Capture and Construction

Concept Artists, The Road to the Emmy Award

Thursday, 11 August 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | East Building, Room 19

Vancouver Studios & Artists Panel

Thursday, 11 August 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm | East Building, Room 19

Killzone 3

Killzone 3, the fourth installment in the popular FPS franchise for PlayStation, sets a new benchmark for epic, immersive first-person combat. The game offers intense battles across enormous and incredibly detailed environments, all in stereoscopic 3D.

Michal Valient
Guerrilla Games

Alien vs Triangles

Aliens vs Triangles uses hardware tessellation to create more realistic and dynamic characters in real time. The demo uses an innovative method of blending multiple displacement maps to create a transformation of the alien's skin. Touching the alien's shoulder starts the transformation that slowly travels over the skin, turning him into a brutal soldier. On the other side of his body, when his hand is touched, an infection moves up his arm until he is fully transformed into a completely different mutant character. A laser blaster reveals the multiple levels of skin that can be blasted away to reveal his metal skeleton. The damage happens on several layers of displacements, starting with blisters, muscles, organs, and finally the metal skeleton. All of this is seamlessly blended using a multi-dimensional tessellation engine on a single-skinned and animated character.

Highlights of the demo include:

Dynamic hardware tessellation to enable richer and more lifelike characters by dynamically increasing resolution based on eye-space distance, transformation maps, and damage maps.

Blending of multi-dimensional displacement maps to enable a single-skinned character to seamlessly transform using many displacement maps.

Tessallator knitting of each level of transformation and damage into a solid mesh, seamlessly integrating multiple displacement maps, tessellation amounts, and surface shaders.

Hardware tessellation for adding detail to the environment, optimized to add detail only where needed.

Seamless shader propagation and display of transformation and damage over a single-skinned character.

A Dynamic BRDF Display

Traditional computer displays are designed to be consistent in varying illumination and viewing conditions. But the real world does not consist of constant colors. It is filled with materials that reflect the surrounding light in characteristic ways. This new approach points the way to a future generation of displays that show the reflectance of materials instead of colors. The goal is to create a surface where the appearance and its relationship to the observer's position and the illuminating environment can be controlled dynamically. The display is based on a liquid surface excited by waves in a controlled way to achieve a varying degree of anisotropic roughness. The resulting probability density function of the surface normal is shown to follow a Gaussian distribution, through which it can be related to popular reflectance models (for example, the Ward BRDF).

Matthias Hullin
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

Hendrik P. A. Lensch
Universität Ulm

Ramesh Raskar
MIT Media Lab

Hans-Peter Seidel
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

Ivo Ihrke
Universität des Saarlandes

Hildapromenade 4

Philipp Engelhardt is a "magician" who had an idea to animate eight polaroids that he found on the street. The result was an animated photo album narrating a new story in a new context. He combined, reconstructed, and repeated his own graphical material and the collected jetsam of pictures to reveal them in a new context. To the observer, the visible alterations in the picture are not immediately apparent; the manipulation is seen as the reality it superposes.

Google Body: 3D Human Anatomy in the Browser

Google Body provides an intuitive 3D context for learning and discussing human anatomy. On a browser, smartphone, or tablet, one can peel away layers of anatomy, rotate and zoom, navigate, and search. This is possible in the browser without a plugin because of the WebGL standard and efficient data transmission.

Arthur Blume
Google, Inc.

Won Chun
Google, Inc.

David Kogan
Google, Inc.

Vangelis Kokkevis
Google, Inc.

Nico Weber
Google, Inc.

Rachel Weinstein Petterson
Google, Inc.

Roni Zeiger
Google, Inc.

Chrysaora: WebGL Jellyfish Simulation

Chrysaora is a real-time jellyfish simulation created entirely with web technologies such as javascript, WebGL, websockets and CSS. It uses realistic rendering and simulation techniques similar to those used in modern 3D video games, but it can run in an internet browser on any operating system. It takes advantage of WebGL API to deliver real-time hardware-accelerated graphics to the browser. At the same time, Chrysaora uses the latest web-socket technology for full-duplex communication over a single TCP socket to establish real-time synchronization across multiple browsers. This enables the application to render different parts of the scene on multiple computers while they are being synchronized by a remote server in real time.

Aleksandar Rodic
Savannah College of Art and Design

A Medical Mirror for Non-Contact Health Monitoring

Digital medical devices promise to transform the future of medicine with their ability to produce exquisitely detailed individual physiological data. As ordinary people gain access to and control over their own physiological data, they can play a more active role in diagnosis and management of their health. This revolution must take place in our everyday lives, not just in the doctor’s office or research lab. This project starts in the home environment by transforming everyday objects into health-sensing technology.

The Medical Mirror is a novel interactive interface that tracks and displays a user’s heart rate in real time without the need for external sensors. Currently, collection of physiological information requires users to strap on bulky sensors, chest straps, or sticky electrodes. The Medical Mirror allows contact-free measurements of physiological information using a basic imaging device. When a user looks into the mirror, an image sensor detects and tracks the location of his or her face over time. By combining techniques in computer vision and advanced signal processing, the user’s heart rate is then computed from the optical signal reflected off the face. The user’s heart rate is displayed on the mirror, allowing visualization of both the user’s physical appearance and physiological state.

This project illustrates an innovative approach to pervasive health monitoring based on state-of-the-art technology. The Medical Mirror fits seamlessly into the ambient home environment, blending the data collection process into the course of daily routines. It is intended to provide a convenient way for people to track their daily health when they use the mirror for shaving, brushing teeth, etc.

Ming-Zher Poh
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology

Daniel McDuff
MIT Media Lab

Rosalind Picard
MIT Media Lab

ItSpace

This wall-mounted interactive installation generates miniature pieces of music composed from the sounds of objects from around the artist's house. Visitors press buttons mounted in photographs of the objects to generate the pieces, and they are invited to mix and match objects as they please.

Alan Wake

Alan Wake is a psychological, action thriller that immerses players in one of the best stories ever told in video games while giving them the ride of their lives with its unique blend of action and light-based game play.

Paul Amer
Microsoft Games Studios

Enlighten Real-Time Radiosity

Using Geomerics Enlighten technology, this demo shows how dynamic real-time lighting enhances game play and visual quality in computer games. Enlighten is a cross-platform, real-time radiosity solution that can generate bounce lighting for a game level in a fraction of a frame. By combining Enlighten real-time radiosity with a fully dynamic lighting environment in Unreal Engine 3, the demo shows how lighting can add an extra dimension to the traditional first-person shooter.

The demo shows the death-match level on a CUDA research platform, which provides an insight into lighting in the next generation of top-tier games. The death-match level contains 100 fighting “bots”, each with a flashlight, sentry rocket turrets, and vehicles with headlights. All lights are shadow casting, and they bounce radiosity lighting.

Weapon fire and explosions contribute most of the lighting to the scene. Action-filled shoot-outs light up the screen, with the radiosity lighting providing most of the fill lighting. The player can control the lighting in the immediate environment through weapon fire and see the lighting from distant fights as it illuminates the level. Dynamic changes in the time of day change the mood and atmosphere in the game, and the demo compares the appearance of the game with and without radiosity lighting.

Sam Martin
Geomerics Ltd.

Device-Independent Imaging System for High-Fidelity Colors

This device-independent imaging system consists of a camera, which can accurately capture colors, and a display device, which can faithfully reproduce colors. To accurately capture colors, a camera with three sensors and three filters like conventional digital cameras was enhanced with color-spectrum sensitivities to satisfy the Luther-Ives condition. As a result, the camera captures colors with very high accuracy (for example, delta E = 0.27 in CIE L*a*b* for MacBeth Color Checker). The display component is a multi-primary color (MPC) display that employs more than three primaries (RGB + Yellow and Cyan in this case) to reproduce a wider color gamut with higher efficiency than conventional RGB-based displays. It can reproduce 99% of the existing material colors, most of which are located out of the color gamut of conventional display devices and cannot be reproduced correctly. The camera outputs signals in device-independent format (for example, XYZ), and the display prototype accurately reproduce those colors. The whole procedure, from capturing to reproducing images, works in real time.

Akiko Yoshida
SHARP Corporation

Kazunari Tomizawa
SHARP Corporation

Makoto Hasegawa
SHARP Corporation

Yasuhiro Yoshida
SHARP Corporation

Yoshifumi Shimodaira
Shizuoka University

0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment

0h!m1gas is a biomimetic stridulation environment based on the activity of an ant colony, under video and audio surveillance. The system archives the ants' movements and sounds inside a digital matrix. A pair of turntables constantly reacts to the colony's activities by spinning vinyl records and producing scratching sounds, similar to the original stridulations of the ants. Ants stridulate, human DJs scratch. This creates a sound-reactive space that reveals the connection between scratching, as an aesthetical expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomenon produced by ants as a modulation mechanism for communication.

GPU-Based Interactive Simulation of Liver Resection

This GPU-based interactive simulation of laparoscopic liver resection is implemented using the open-source SOFA framework. While similar medical simulators have been developed in the past, this demo relies on advanced methods and the computational power of current GPUs to simulate multiple organs with high-resolution deformations and collisions in real time. It is based on recently proposed methods: high-resolution Finite Element Model (FEM) with implicit time-integration implemented on GPU, volume-contact constraints, an efficient numerical solver based on asynchronous preconditioning, and improvements in visual and haptic rendering. And it uses detailed meshes generated from segmented CT scans to facilitate reproduction of patient-specific scenarios, which is necessary for pre-operative rehearsal of complex or risky medical procedures.

These methods allow real-time simulation of all organs in the abdominal cavity using an improved level of precision compared to previous systems. The FEM formulation enables reproduction of specific material properties. Contacts are handled by precise constraints with frictions on detailed surface meshes. Both methods efficiently support topological changes, as demonstrated by performing a resection of a portion of a liver, an important step in surgical procedures performed to remove cancerous tumors. Users can examine the mechanical and collision models, and the generated contacts while the simulated patient is breathing, and manipulate a laparoscopic instrument to navigate through the abdominal cavity, push on organs, and perform a thermal ablation.

Face-to-Avatar

This floating avatar system integrates a blimp with a virtual avatar to create a unique system of telepresence. The blimp avatar contains several pieces of equipment, including a projector and a speaker as the output functions. Users communicate with others by presenting their facial images through the projector and voices through the speaker. A camera and microphone attached to the blimp provide the input function and support the user’s manipulation from a distance. The user’s presence is more dramatic than a conventional virtual avatar (CG and image), because the avatar is a physical object and moves freely in the real world. In addition, the user’s senses are augmented, because the blimp detects dynamic information in the real world. For example, the camera provides a special floating view to the user, and the microphone collects a wide variety of sounds such as conversations and environmental noise.

Hiroaki Tobita
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.

Shigeaki Maruyama
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.

Open House

Open House is an installation that allows visitors to telematically squat in a Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the US housing collapse. Virtual markets transformed this otherwise livable property into a ghost house. Prior to the collapse, movements of global capital seemed like a distant reality, but it was imaginary systems of value, not bricks and mortar, that asserted ultimate authority. Open House temporarily resists eviction by mirroring the market and creating hybrid subjects who occupy both virtual and physical space. Cross the threshold, open the door, flicker the lights, and rattle the shutters.

This interactive medical visualization system is based on two hand-held tracked controllers that directly control the position and orientation of two 3D cursors. Button presses enable direct manipulation of space with either or both hands, resulting in intuitive manipulation of the viewpoint. You can place yourself anywhere at any orientation and at any scale with just a few simple gestures. A control panel, held in the left hand, acts as a container for tools and widgets such as sliders and buttons. For example, the widgets can be used to select various tools, or control transparency and rendering mode.

iMedic also includes the FilterBox, which enables radiologists to dynamically and simultaneously visualize multiple mappings of their data. They can see beyond obstructing anatomy to hidden or partially hidden structures, and they can quickly identify, isolate, and view structures of interest from any angle, which reduces the time-consuming need to reposition and rescan or physically inspect the patient.

The system uses several real-time raycasting shaders. These shaders include isosurface, transparency, maximum-intensity projection, and lit volumetric rendering, as well as hybrid shaders that combine these rendering methods. The shaders also support mixing of volumetric and polygonal data, which provides accurate depth cues.

iMedic currently supports several features including measurement (for example, linear, angular, and area), volume segmentation and editing, and multiple avatar collaboration. The software will be commercially available later this year.

Soft objects are widely used in day-to-day life, because they are safer and more comfortable than hard objects. They also provide a natural and rich haptic sensation, so soft interfaces can improve emotional attachment and entertainment value in human-machine interaction.

The FuwaFuwa sensor is a small, flexible, and wireless module that effectively measures shape deformations in soft objects using IR-based directional photo-reflectivity measurements. Multiple embedded FuwaFuwa sensors can easily convert any stuffed object into a touch-input device that can detect both touch position and surface displacement. Also, since the sensors re battery-powered and equipped with wireless communication, they can be easily installed in any common soft object without affecting its soft properties.

Memoirs

Memoirs is an interactive installation that depicts humanity’s struggle to invent home appliances in pursuit of happiness. It is composed of a custom Polaroid camera atop a TV. As you approach, the camera takes a picture by recognizing your face. While a physically simulated photo paper falls down inside the virtual interior of the piece, digital data travel halfway around the earth to a web server. Like bringing films to the printer, taking a card with a printed web address from a stack creates a space in which to reminisce about the good old days.

Kinectimals

Give your favorite wild animal a new home! Kinectimals puts you and your family in the middle of the most heart-warming animal experience ever. Adopt, name, care for, play with, and love your new friend. Kinectimals enables players to reach beyond the fourth wall and interact with a virtual pet using the Kinect sensor technology.

HAPMAP

This navigation system enhances walking and sightseeing with a haptic technique that could replace maps. The system's natural, intuitive interface indicates subtle and complex navigation cues that follow the curvature of a road or path.

Conventional navigation systems tell users to “go straight” even when the road or path curves in one direction or another. HAPMAP presents complex feedback through a very simple design. By mimicking the operation and interface of sliding handrails, the it is intuitive and particularly useful for the visually impaired, who need these subtle cues to successfully navigate a winding path. It can present not only right- and left-turn navigation cues, but also subtle navigation cues for a winding itinerary. Using motion capture cameras, it also automatically controls the haptic feedback for real-time navigation.

HAPMAP’s simple design and construction is important to its ease-of-use and function as a portable navigation device. A large, heavy, and/or complex device would not be feasible in these circumstances.

Yuki Imamura
Keio University

Hironori Arakawa
Keio University

Sho Kamuro
The University of Tokyo

Kouta Minamizawa
Keio University

Susumu Tachi
Keio University

MOSTON

A 12-foot-tall suspended inflatable sculpture, MOSTON conjures a technology-driven amalgamation of Moscow and Boston with its three-dimensional form of mutated Russian nesting dolls and two-dimensional surface design of printed artwork and documentary footage projection.

A Look Under the Hood of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit used image-based lighting for the forward-rendered cars to help them look integrated with the deferred-rendered environment, which dynamically changes with a full-day cycle of light and weather. A custom anti-aliased line-rendering technique greatly improved the aliasing artifacts that are common to deferred rendering.

The dynamic look of the game was enhanced with weather effects, including rain, snow, wet roads, lightning, and heat haze. A procedural sky and multi-colored atmosphere system included height fog. The post effects system included color grading, bloom, vignette, and a game-play-based treatment. Gamma-correct rendering and filmic tone mapping were used to ensure a good tonal response in the HDR range. Artistry was required to effectively manage a large number of visual controls, some changing spatially and some over time.

This demo features all the bells and whistles of this game turned up to 11. A special game build accelerates the time of day, turns on all the weather, and culminates in some action-packed racing and crashing with all the related effects spectacle.

Henry LaBounta
Alex Fry
Criterion Games - Electronic Arts

InteractiveTop: An Entertainment System that Enhances The Experience of Playing Tops

Spinning tops have a long history as children’s toys. A top is a simple toy, but its behavior is unique compared to other physical toys. Its attractive behavior is based on the gyroscopic effect acting within the top. Children sense the force of the gyroscopic effect when they handle tops, which helps them discover a basic phenomenon of physics.

This project extends those experiences with augmented-reality technologies by providing visual, audio, and force feedback. Traditionally, the user applies an external force to the top, but direct touching often has the unintended effect of moving the top, hence limiting continuous interaction between the user and top. InteractiveTop is an entertainment system that supports virtual physical contact between the user and the top, which allows direct, prolonged interaction.

Toshiki Sato
The University of Electro-Communications

Yasushi Matoba
The University of Electro-Communications

Hideki Koike
The University of Electro-Communications

Reveries and Line Drawings

In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's New Blood Exhibition, stored spatial reveries can be recalled and represented using both analog and digital technologies.

Raging Rapids Rides

This scene of a river flowing through a rough valley achieves a level of realism not seen before in real time. The river exhibits a variety of medium- and small-scale details, including breaking waves, waterfalls, foam, and splashes resulting from interaction with solids. The goal of the player or autopilot is to drive a boat past as many checkpoints as possible while avoiding falling rocks and logs as well as deformable water plants.

A hybrid water-simulation method combines a height-field grid with particles. The main body of water is simulated by solving the shallow-water equations on the grid. Four types of particles are auto-generated using physically inspired criteria. Wave fronts with slopes exceeding a limit emit particles to form breaking waves. Waterfall particles are generated when the water flows across steep terrain. Collisions of solids with the water surface produce splashes with a volume that depends on the impact velocity. When particles fall into the grid, they are turned into foam which is then advected with the horizontal flow of the water surface. When particles are created, they take away mass from the grid and deposit it again when they return. The system adds water-surface details using wave textures generated by an FFT-based simulation. Texture coordinates are advected with the water flow and regenerated periodically to reduce distortion. Rigid and deformable objects are two-way coupled with the height-field simulation. Solids alter the height and velocity of water, which in turn exerts drag, lift, and buoyancy forces on the solids.

The underlying simulation technique is an extension of Chentanez N. and Muller M., Real-time simulation of large bodies of water with small scale details, Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics SCA.

Nuttapong Chentanez
NVIDIA Corporation

Matthias Muller
NVIDIA Corporation

Immersive Multitouch Workspace

This new system efficiently combines direct multitouch interaction and 3D stereoscopic visualization. Users interact by way of simple 2D gestures on a monoscopic touchscreen, while visualizing occlusion-free 3D stereoscopic objects floating above the surface at an optically correct distance. By registering the 3D virtual space with the physical space, the system produces a rich, seamless workspace where the advantages of both direct and indirect interaction are jointly exploited. In addition to standard multitouch gestures and controls (for example, pan, zoom, and standard 2D widgets), the system includes a dedicated multitouch 3D transformation widget that allows near-direct control of rotations, scaling, and translations of the manipulated objects. To illustrate the power of this setup, a demo scenario allows participants to reassemble 3D virtual fragments. The scenario unifies the strengths of both multitouch interaction and stereoscopic visualization in an innovative and relevant workspace.

Benoit Bossavit
INRIA Bordeaux

Jean-Baptiste de la Rivière
Immersion SAS

Toni Da Luz
Immersion SAS

Mathieu Courtois
Immersion SAS

Cedric Kervegant
Immersion SAS

Martin Hachet
INRIA Bordeaux

RolyPoly

RolyPoly enables two individuals to “sense” the presence of each other even though they may be physically apart. This is achieved through the mirrored movements in a pair of RolyPolys. A gentle tap to rock one RolyPoly simultaneously rocks its partner RolyPoly to the same degree. Likewise, a sudden shake and rattle in one instantly produces a corresponding reaction in the other.

• Ease of use and user-oriented technology. Digiteyezer uses an embedded human interface that delivers 3D scanning capabilities to a wide range of users.

• 3D models with lifelike (or photo-realistic) rendering. Digiteyezer's technology allows creation and display of 3D models with a lifelike rendering, which gives users a brand-new relationship to 3D models. For example, when the applications are people oriented (face scanning, medical apps, fashion apps), the user experience is much more intense, because users see themselves as they are in the real life.

Frederic Courteille
Digiteyezer

Benoit Boquillon
Digiteyezer

tele-present wind

This installation consists of a field of x/y tilting devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in the gallery, and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer outdoors. When the wind blows, it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects and transmits this movement in real time to the grouping of devices in the gallery.

MoleBot: Mole in a Table

Many previous explorations of shape display (Feelex, Pop Up!, Lumen, and Relief) adopted the principle of the pinscreen and tried to develop a rigid yet flexible surface that renders dynamic three-dimensional forms in the real world. These shape displays involve hundreds of pins separately actuated by an elaborate mechanism. The MoleBot combines higher actuation speed, greater resolution, and smaller pixel size than demonstrated in previous projects, plus enhanced physical interactivity with objects on the table surface. It is based on a new shape-display method: a two-dimensional translating cam (mole cam), 15,000 closely packed hexagonal pins equivalent to cam followers, and a layer of spandex between the mole cam and the pins to reduce friction.

The MoleBot can interact with physical objects in two ways. The force from the mole cam can push objects or pull something sensitive to magnetism with a neodymium magnet. It could be a new game interface, in which people build a small world on a table by replacing hexagonal pixels with different types of small props and enjoy playful physical interactions between the MoleBot and objects in the real world.

Narae Lee
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Ju-Whan Kim
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Jungsoo Lee
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Myeongsoo Shin
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Woohun Lee
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

The Garden of Error and Decay

In this data-driven narrative of current world disasters, the artist, Twitter users, and stock-exchange information all influence the storytelling.

Mommy Tummy: A Pregnancy Experience System Simulating Fetal Movement

Mommy Tummy is an interactive system that simulates pregnancy. A user wearing the Mommy Tummy jacket can feel the fetus’s temperature, movement, and heartbeat, and, by rubbing the jacket, communicate with the fetus. Within a few minutes, the jacket's weight and size change, simulating fetal growth over nine months. An auxiliary screen displays the condition of both the fetus and the mother in each simulated month with a 3D model of the fetus. The moods and activity of the fetus are displayed in a natural manner to simulate normal fetal development.

There are two types of fetal movement: kicking and wiggling. Achieving a kicking simulation is not so difficult, but wiggling simulation is not simple. It was achieved by using a technique inspired by the tactile funneling illusion (PhS) initially discovered by Georg von Bekesy as a type of illusory tactile sensation that arises between two points of simultaneous vibration or electric stimulation. Using PhS, Mommy Tummy simulates a wiggling sensation through continuous, temporally displaced operation of multiple air actuators.

When the user moves violently, the fetus enters a bad mood state and makes intense movements. On the other hand, when the user caresses the abdomen, the fetus enters a good mood state and makes steady movements. Heavy physical exercise is discouraged until a stable period is reached.

Takayuki Kosaka
Kanagawa Institute of Technology

Takuya Iwamoto
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Robert Songer
Kanazawa Technical College

Junichi Akita
Kanazawa University

Hajime Misumi
Kanagawa Institute of Technology

The Insatiable

The Insatiable is a video installation composited from a dozen sets of footage filmed during an open night market in Taiwan. It is part of the Things that are edible series. The visual strategy is a fusion of macro and micro views. Originally from Taiwan, artist Jawshing Liou filmed this video during his recent artist residency in Taipei. The street scenes are only half a mile away from his home.

Photochromic Sculpture: Volumetric Color-Forming Pixels

Color-forming reflective displays like E Ink are easy on the eye even in bright environments. Applying photochromic materials (PM) and projected-light systems to this type of display makes it possible to control color without contact with the display surface. In this project, the concept of “contactless color control,” is extended to volumetric space to create “volumetric color-forming pixels”. The result is “photochromic sculpture”, which can generate a dynamically changeable 3D object.

The system consists of two components:

• A presentation component composed of laminated transparent plates coated with PM granules and Spiropyran, which produces color under ultraviolet light (UV) and gradually becomes colorless and transparent when the UV light is blocked

• A control component for manipulating projected light.

The project team is developing a projector that can provide a more complicated UV pattern and investigating how to create larger-scale photochromic sculptures in outdoor locations.

Tomoko Hashida
The University of Tokyo

Yasuaki Kakehi
Keio University

Takeshi Naemura
The University of Tokyo

Third Skin

Third Skin captures imagery of our social, digital, or urban neighborhoods and interiors, and transfers them to fabric and dress design. It plays with Marshall McLuhan's idea of "clothing being an extension of skin, in the way that media are an extension of the body". Photography, surveillance, and online footage become the source for hand-manufactured dresses as media narratives. They map the collective and shared (image documentation, digital and physical scenarios and objects) onto the domestic: a one-off garment as individual statement and choice.

PocoPoco: A Tangible Device That Allows Users To Play Dynamic Tactile Interaction

PocoPoco was created by a research team that focuses on interfaces that can change their own shapes dynamically. It is a box-shaped device that uses built-in solenoid actuators to control the movement of cylindrical units and deliver dynamic tactile sensations.

With its simple, intuitive tactile interface, PocoPoco can be used in a variety of applications that would normally employ a more "functional" device, such as a keyboard, that allows users to engage in a virtual world without being conscious of their physical manipulation and sensory input/output experience.

A musical variation of the system, PocoSeqencer, allows users to easily create aural and visual components of a performance at the same time by simply pushing cylindrical actuators.

Takaharu Kanai
Tokyo Metropolitan University

Yuya Kikukawa
Tokyo Metropolitan University

Tatsuhiko Suzuki
Tokyo Metropolitan University

Tetsuaki Baba
Tokyo Metropolitan University

Kumiko Kushiyama
Tokyo Metropolitan University

Tomorrow will get better

A graphite drawing and laser-cut paper series of homes destroyed by various natural and man-made disasters.

Recompose: Direct and Gestural Interaction With an Actuated Surface

Recompose builds on the Relief table developed by Leithinger. The table consists of an array of 120 individually addressable pins, whose height can be actuated and read back simultaneously to provide both input and output. Recompose extends this concept by placing a depth camera above the tabletop surface to detect basic user gestures.

The combination of direct manipulation, I/O coincidence, an instantaneous feedback loop, and gestural input is a largely unexplored research area. Recompose explores this area through a system that leverages the strengths of these interaction techniques. It uses a grammar of gestures to explore basic functions for interacting with an actuated surface. Initial explorations show that the most fundamental set of gestures includes: selection of a subset of the surface, translation of the selection, rotation of the selection, and scaling of the selection.

Recompose moves digital modeling into the physical space by adding intuitive hands-on design. This approach may contribute significantly to fields where rapid iteration and visualization are fundamental to the process of learning and creation, including (but not limited to) architectural design, three-dimensional product design, and medical imaging.

David Lakatos
MIT Media Lab

Matthew Blackshaw
MIT Media Lab

Anthony DeVincenzi
MIT Media Lab

Daniel Leithinger
MIT Media Lab

Ishii Hiroshi
MIT Media Lab

Transplant

Transplant explores the lives of Japanese nationals and citizens who were interned in War Relocation Centers in the dusty desert of California during WWII, and how they cultivated gardens as a creative outlet to survive their confinement. Despite the horrendous conditions, residents of these “camps” constructed beautifully landscaped parks, ponds, and rock gardens. Transplant pays homage to their ingenuity and personal drive to transform gravel into gardens, altering their built environment as an act of defiance.

Surround Haptics: Sending Shivers Down Your Spine

Surround Haptics is a new tactile technology that allows generation of high-resolution, continuous, moving tactile sensations anywhere on the human body. The technology is inexpensive. It can be used with a broad range of off-the-shelf tactile actuators. It is compact. And it can easily be integrated into clothes, furniture, accessories, hand tools, mobile devices, and game accessories, among other potential applications.

Surround Haptics could become a key technology in a new generation of home-gaming platforms that integrate highly detailed and dynamic tactile experiences with full-body motion controls, stereoscopic visuals, and spatial sound. This demonstration presents two examples:

• A modular home tactile display: a custom plywood chair that can also be used in daily life, soft pads for the seat and backrest with embedded tactile grids, and a wireless control board. The user controls the game with full-body gestures using Microsoft Kinect.

The Surround Haptics technology is based on new models of tactile perception that were formulated in a series of rigorous psychophysical studies. These new models further expand and deepen our understanding of human tactile perception.

Ali Israr
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Ivan Poupyrev
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Christopher Ioffreda
Carnegie Mellon University

Jim Cox
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Seung-Chan Kim
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Nathan Gouveia
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Huw Bowles
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Anastasios Brakis
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Baylor Knight
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Kenny Mitchell
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Tom Williams
Black Rock Studio (Disney Interactive Studios)

Travel Stones

Travel Stones are fictitious cultural artifacts presented in the style of a museum exhibit. The imagined culture derives from an ancient people who carry their travel stones, like house keys, as a way to access their home center that is ultimately more spiritual than physical. Passed from generation to generation, the stones further serve as resonant objects in the tracing of the people's history. Prompted by the drawings on the stones, the ancients recount tales of their origins to the next generations as well as to those they meet in travel.

Telenoid: Tele-Presence Android for Communication

This new system of telecommunication focuses on the idea of transferring human “presence”. A minimal human conveys the impression of human existence at first glance, but it doesn’t suggest anything about personal features such as gender or age. The minimal appearance allows people to use Telenoid to transfer their presence to distant places regardless of their personal features.

Telenoid's tele-operation system is simple and intuitive. It can be controlled by even novice users. Its face-tracking system automatically captures the operator’s facial movements and expressions. Field tests revealed that most users tended to have a strange and negative feeling impression of Telenoid in the beginning, but eventually they became comfortable. Elderly people had very positive feelings about Telenoid at first sight.

Kohei Ogawa
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Shuichi Nishio
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Kensuke Koda
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Koichi Taura
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Takashi Minato
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Carlos Toshinori Ishii
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Hiroshi Ishiguro
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication

Wait

The companion-species relationship is the starting point for the critique explored in Wait. Human and canine communication methods are brought to bear within this interactive video installation. Taking cues from the movements of the visitor, the dog (as imaged in the video) points to the relationship of control. The dog appears to be waiting for direction; as the dog looks directly at viewers, a state of suspended agency is implied, and viewers are compelled to ask questions about their relationship to the dog. Wait was produced in co-production with the Banff New Media Institute.

Thermal Interactive Media

The Thermal Interactive Media (TIM) display is a multi-sensory experience that combines beautiful visual elements, the soothing touch of water, and the bubbling sounds of flowing water combined with the gentle clacking sound of deer chasers.

The display consists of a horizontal rear-projection screen covered with a thin layer of water and two basins filled with water, one on each side of the display. One basin is filled with hot water, one with cold. Mounted above and pointing at the screen is a FLIR thermal imaging camera. Driving the whole system is a PC workstation generating two simultaneous video streams, one “hot” and one “cold”.

Users can choose to pour hot or cold water onto the display, using ladles in the basins. Wherever the user pours in hot water, TIM displays the “hot” video stream. Wherever the user pours in cold water, TIM displays the “cold” video stream. In the regions in between, the two video streams mix and swirl together based on the water temperature. By observing how the two video streams mix together, users can see real-world fluid dynamics in action and watch in real time as the thermal energy dissipates and distributes throughout the water. The experience is simultaneously magical, educational, entertaining, and relaxing.

For an extra level of fun, users can don ChromaDepth glasses to augment the experience with a pseudo-stereoscopic effect. Regions of warm water colored red float above the screen and the cool regions of water colored blue punch holes deep into the surface.

Mark Mine
Walt Disney Imagineering

Dustin Barnard
Walt Disney Imagineering

Bei Yang
Walt Disney Imagineering

Touch Interface on Back of the Hand

This new computer-human interface uses the back of the hand for inputting data.

Many touch-based interfaces present various types of buttons on small screens. But there is one drawback with this approach. Users cannot feel haptic feedback (“clicks”, for example), because the displays do not have physical buttons or provide any visual or auditory cues. Using our skin as an input surface can solve this problem, because we can feel and know which area is tapped.

Building on previous studies that used human skin as an input interface, this project focuses on the opisthenar area (back of the hand), which is relatively flat and convenient. Users can feel precise tactile feedback since the skin on the hand is more sensitive than skin in other locations. One potential advantage of this approach is that many people wear wristwatches. If those devices could be enhanced so they can detect finger position on the opishtenar, additional external devices will not be necessary.

Kei Nakatsuma
The University of Tokyo

Hiroyuki Shinoda
The University of Tokyo

Yasutoshi Makino
Keio University

Katsunari Sato
Keio University

Takashi Maeno
Keio University

True 3D Display

This research team was the first to use laser-plasma technology for a true-3D display device that allows users to draw 3D images in midair (True 3D Display Using Laser Plasma in the Air, Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2006). Now the team has developed a much more compact and precise display, called SRV (Super Real Vision)-5000, based on advanced laser technology. One remarkable feature of the new device is its enhanced resolution: from 300 points per second to 50,000 points per second. It displays 3D objects more faithfully in real time and increases the range of possible applications.

Hidei Kimura
Burton Inc.

Akira Asano
Burton Inc.

Issei Fujishiro
Keio University

Ayaka Nakatani
Keio University

Hayato Watanabe
Keio University

Vection Field for Pedestrian Traffic Control

Public pathways can present difficulties for pedestrians (for example, congestion and collisions). Although visual signs and audio cues are commonly used to encourage smoother pedestrian flow, they are often ignored or neglected because they require some time to be understood. For more intuitive navigation, wearable devices have been proposed, but these personal navigation devices, some of which induce motion by haptic or vestibular cues, are not suitable for congestion scenarios because numerous devices are required for controlling pedestrian flow, which is quite impractical.

This project focuses on large moving visual cues, which induce a sense of self-movement. For example, a large right-moving image on the floor induces a shift of walking direction to the right, even if the pedestrian tries to walk straight. Because it does not have a power source, the system uses lenticular lenses containing images of striped patterns. When pedestrians walk forward, the stripes shift to the right, and so do the pedestrians. The configuration is exactly the same for two opposite-facing pedestrians.

The Vection Field has four advantages. It achieves intuitive navigation that does not require conscious recognition. It does not require wearable devices. It does not require a power supply. And a single sheet of lenticular lenses naturally works for pedestrians walking in both directions.

Hiromi Yoshikawa
The University of Electro-Communications

Taku Hachisu
The University of Electro-Communications

Shogo Fukushima
The University of Electro-Communications

Masahiro Furukawa
The University of Electro-Communications

Hiroyuki Kajimoto
The University of Electro-Communications

The Cyclone Display: Rotation, Reflection, Flicker, and Recognition Combined With the Pixels.

Cyclone Display has three significant points in comparison to other displays:

• It has rotating pixels made of patterned paper disks.
• Flicker and body movements (eye blinking or hand waving) can change the appearance of the disk patterns.
• It uses lighting conditions to display recognizable scenes.

The pattern variations in the disks (determined by disk-rotation speed) create a display. Flickering light is provided by a timed RGB projector.

Yoichi Ochiai
University of Tsukuba

Hiromu Takai
University of Tsukuba

The Virtual Crepe Factory: 6DoF Haptic Interaction With Fluids

The Virtual Crepe Factory illustrates a novel approach for six-degree-of-freedom haptic interaction with fluids. It showcases a two-handed interactive haptic scenario: a recipe that uses different types of fluid in order to make a special pancake (a "crepe"). The scenario guides the user through all the steps required to prepare a crepe: from stirring and pouring the dough to spreading different toppings, without forgetting the always-challenging flipping of the crepe. For the first time, users can experience 6DoF haptic interactions with fluids of varying viscosity. The technique is based on a smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) physically based simulation.

Gabriel Cirio
INRIA

Maud Marchal
NSA/INRIA

Sebastien Hillaire
INRIA and Orange Labs

Anatole Lécuyer
INRIA

Volumetric Display Based on Vibrating Mylar Beam Splitter and LED Backlit LCD

This new volumetric display produces full-color, high-spatial-resolution aerial images out in front of the apparatus. It is based on a new optical element: the large, tunable-resonance, edge-driven, varifocal beam splitter.

Previous varifocal systems stretch an opaque Mylar mirror over the aperture of a loudspeaker. The speaker vibrates the mirror. making it alternately concave and convex. A synchronized, high-speed (oscillograph) image is viewed in the mirror and swept in depth. This type of display was commercialized as Spacegraph 3D in the late 1970s, but a number of problems limited its acceptance. The loudspeaker was noisy. The image was virtual (behind the mirror), since the mirror curvature is insufficient to create real images. The systems had small viewing apertures, since the display blocked the user's mirror view. Non-standard (now obsolete) oscillograph displays were used, and the systems were bulky, since it was difficult to fold their optical paths.

This new display uses a circular Mylar beam splitter and adds a tension-adjusting metal hoop pressed against its surface. The beam splitter is adjusted, with high Q, to a specific resonance frequency. Three rim-mounted impulse drivers apply low-amplitude sinusoldal drive. Due to the high Q, the diaphram's sympathetic vibration is large. The beam splitter folds the optical path, and the system includes a fixed-curvature concave mirror to create real images that appear out in front of the apparatus. It produces high-quality 3D images that occupy a one-third-meter cube 1/3 meter out in front of the apparatus. The image is viewable over a 30 degree viewing angle.

Lanny Smoot
Disney Research

Quinn Smithwick
Disney Research

Daniel Reetz
Disney Research

This one-day event brings together the leaders who have contributed to the direction, production, and evolution of the computer graphics community to elucidate the elements of finance, strategy, culture, and creativity. Separate admission fee required. Not included in any other SIGGRAPH 2011 registration categories. Attendance for this event is very limited.

IVRC (International Collegiate Virtual Reality Contest)

10th anniversary of IVRC! The International Collegiate Virtual Reality Contest is organized through the Virtual Reality Society. IVRC2011, the 19th annual competition, is scheduled for this fall.

Bringing ZBrush to Life: Advanced Visualization Techniques

This in-depth look at a sculpture created in ZBrush reviews sculpting techniques, methods used to create the character and scene, the steps needed to take this 3D scene and composite it properly as a 2D render in Photoshop, and how to bring the sculpture to life by printing it in 3D.

Andrew F. Smith
University of Michigan

SandCanvas: New Possibilities in Sand Animation

Inspired by the history, popularity, and aesthetics of sand animation(also known as sand art), this new multitouch digital artistic medium simplifies creation of sand animations and enables entirely new expressions.

Rubaiat Kazi
National University of Singapore

Kien-Chuan Chua
National University of Singapore

Shengdong Zhao
National University of Singapore

Richard Davis
Singapore Management University

Low Kok-Lim
National University of Singapore

Coherent Out-of-Core Point-Based Global Illumination

This talk describes new techniques for coherent out-of-core point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion that are being used at DreamWorks Animation in the making of CG-animated feature films.

Janne Kontkanen
Google

Eric Tabellion
PDI/DreamWorks

Ryan S. Overbeck
PDI/DreamWorks

Overview of SIGGRAPH 2011 (with Japanese interpreter)

Members of the SIGGRAPH 2011 Committee present an overview of the conference and highlights of their programs.

Miho Aoki
mihoalaska (at) gmail.com

Liquid Simulation With Mesh-Based Surface Tracking

Animating detailed liquid surfaces has always been a challenge for computer graphics researchers and visual effects artists. Over the past few years, researchers in this field have focused on mesh-based surface tracking to synthesize extremely detailed liquid surfaces as efficiently as possible. This course provides a solid understanding of the steps required to create a fluid simulator with a mesh-based liquid surface.

The course begins with an overview of several existing liquid-surface-tracking techniques and the pros and cons of each method. Then it explains how to embed a triangle mesh into a finite-difference-based fluid simulator and describes several methods for allowing the liquid surface to merge together or break apart. The final section showcases the benefits and further applications of a mesh-based liquid surface, highlighting state-of-the-art methods for tracking colors and textures, maintaining liquid volume, preserving small surface features, and simulating realistic surface-tension waves.

Introduction to Python Scripting

In this introduction to Python, a powerful scripting language used by many 3D applications, attendees learn the basics and explore small example scenarios gleaned from actual game and film productions. The sessions are taught in a way that should empower attendees to immediately begin creating time-saving python scripts and applications.

Chris Evans
CryENGINE

Introduction to Modern OpenGL Programming

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all of the major computer operating systems. Its uses range from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design, interactive gaming, and entertainment, and with each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

This course is an accelerated introduction to programming OpenGL, emphasizing the most modern methods for using the library. In recent years, OpenGL has evolved and fundamentally changed how programmers interact with the application programming interface (API). The most notable change was the introduction of shader-based rendering, which has expanded to subsume almost all functionality in OpenGL. The course reviews each of the shader stages in OpenGL and how to specify data for rendering with OpenGL. And it summarizes how OpenGL's wealth of new functionality and features enables creation of ever-richer content.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Greeting and Course Overview
Shreiner

2:10 pm
OpenGL Pipeline Introduction
Shreiner

2:35 pm
A Prototype Application
Angel

3:15 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 1: Vertex Shading
Angel

3:55 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 2: Fragment Shading
Angel

4:30 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 1: Tessellation Shading
Shreiner

4:50 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 2: Geometry shading
Shreiner

5:05 pm
Wrap-Up: Questions and Answers
Angel & Shreiner

Destruction and Dynamics for Film and Game Production

This course focuses on rigid-body and particle simulation and collision techniques used in breaking objects and large-scale destruction. Following a brief introduction to the basic theory, the course continues with examples from specific films and games. Topics include production aspects such as authoring tools (including the open-source Bullet physics library used in both game and film production) and computational and algorithmic issues.

Blender Foundation: Community Meeting

Chairman Ton Roosendaal presents the results of the past year's work on the open-source 3D program Blender, summarizes plans for next year, and invites attendees to provide feedback.

Blender Foundation
ton (at) blender.org

Animation and Rigging in Blender

An introduction to Blender for users of other 3D software. The talk focuses on rigging and animation for "unusual" setups: effects sequences such as growing, timel apse, and motion graphics. But it also touches on some of Blender's character-animation tools and add-ons, modeling materials and rendering, and the Blender "mental model" for user interfaces, data structures, and scripting.

Bassam Kurdali

3D Spatial Interaction: Applications for Art, Design, and Science

3D interfaces use motion sensing, physical input, and spatial interaction techniques to effectively control highly dynamic virtual content. Now, with the advent of the Nintendo Wii, Sony Move, and Microsoft Kinect, game developers and researchers must create compelling interface techniques and game-play mechanics that make use of these technologies. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that emerging game technologies are not just going to change the way we play games, they are also going to change the way we make and view art, design new products, analyze scientific datasets, and more.

This introduction to 3D spatial interfaces demystifies the workings of modern videogame motion controllers and provides an overview of how it is used to create 3D interfaces for tasks such as 2D and 3D navigation, object selection and manipulation, and gesture-based application control. Topics include the strengths and limitations of various motion-controller sensing technologies in today’s peripherals, useful techniques for working with these devices, and current and future applications of these technologies to areas beyond games. The course presents valuable information on how to utilize existing 3D user-interface techniques with emerging technologies, how to develop interface techniques, and how to learn from the successes and failures of spatial interfaces created for a variety of application domains.

This complete demolition system combines an efficient pipeline with the artist-friendly simulation tools used to destroy a city in DreamWorks Animation's "Megamind".

David Lipton
DreamWorks Animation

Eli Bocek-Rivele
DreamWorks Animation

Greg Gladstone
DreamWorks Animation

Fangwei Lee
DreamWorks Animation

Mark Carlson
DreamWorks Animation

PhotoSpace: A Vision-Based Approach for Digiziting Props

This talk concentrates on how some of the recent advances in computer graphics and vision fit into a visual-effects pipeline and how they are used to digitize props.

Pravin Bhat
Weta Digital Ltd.

Sebastian Burke
Weta Digital Ltd.

Artistic Rendering of Feathers for Animated Films

This powerful feather-rendering system emphasizes artistic control and flexible workflow. It was critical to realization of feathered characters like Crane, Fifi, and Lord Shen, the anti-hero in "Kung Fu Panda 2".

Feng Xie
DreamWorks Animation

The IGDA Presents Game Jam!

An annual activity of the International Game Developers Association, the Global Game Jam, each year in late-January, is the world's largest game-jam event. Over 5,000 games are developed in one weekend. This session presents an overview of the Global Game Jam and other activities of the IGDA.

Jack Bogdan
jack (at) igda.org

A Unified Dynamics Pipeline for Hair, Cloth, and Flesh in "Rango"

This dynamics pipeline integrates all forms of deformable simulation, consolidates the artist's toolset, and opens the door to high-quality and convincing dynamics.

Stephen Bowline
Industrial Light & Magic

ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Present Local Animation Festivals

Animation festivals remain a hugely popular activity with all segments of the digital-media community. This is your chance to find out about how two chapters run their festivals. If you're interested in finding out more about how to run such a festival, or just want to take a peek behind the curtain, don't miss this talk.

Scott Lang
New York City ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter
scott (at) siggraph.org

Using the GigaPan Imaging System

The GigaPan system of hardware, image-processing software, and a web application supports the capture, creation, and presentation of gigapixel images. In this workshop, attendees participate in creating a GigaPan image from start to finish: scouting a shooting location near the conference center, setting up the GigaPan robot, taking the source images, stitching these images into a GigaPan, uploading to a web site, and annotating the final GigaPan. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own digital cameras for use with the GigaPan robot, but a limited number of digital cameras will be provided.

Gene Cooper
Four Chambers Studio, LLC

Rich Gibson
Carnegie Mellon University

Successful Creative Collaboration Across Time and Space

Twenty years ago, large projects in computer graphics animation, game development, and visual effects typically involved a half-dozen artists and engineers working together in a single studio space. Ten years later, the size of project teams had grown to include sometimes hundreds of collaborators, but the work remained largely housed within a single campus. In 2011, many projects, large and small, are distributed across multiple locations and time zones. Facilitating creative problem solving among team members remains the key to success, but the tools and behaviors within the creative process are changing dramatically.

This panel discusses issues surrounding globally distributed projects in animation, games, and visual effects. Success in these ventures depends on unique production structures, review processes, universal tool sets, and adaptation of artists and engineers to technology-mediated communication. Topics include speculation on possible future work environments and how the rising generation of artists and engineers will influence the collaboration process. Each panelist brings a specific area of expertise to the general topic and represents an organization recognized for successfully advancing industry capability with distributed projects.

Tim McLaughlin
Texas A&M University

Tim Fields
Certain Affinity, Inc.

Jonathan Gibbs
DreamWorks Animation

David A. Parrish
Reel FX Creative Studios

Steve Sullivan
Industrial Light & Magic

Phase One Digital Tools

Lee Peterson

SolidState Drives in Developer and Artist Workstations

By optimizing games to exploit the capabilities of the latest platform technology and tools, game developers can create games featuring innovations that give players greater immersion. Spend your engineering time making the content more realistic and immersive instead of working around storage delays. With this idea in mind, Intel partnered with Iron Galaxy and Digital Extremes to deliver a proof of concept showing the content quality that can be achieved by exploiting the performance of Intel SSDs and second-generation Intel Core Family processors.

Ryan Tabrah
Intel Corporation

Kami Geometry Instancer: Putting the “Smurfy” in Smurf Village

Kami is a geometry-instancing pipeline to generate and deform simple primitives like curves (for fur, hair, and grass) and arbitrarily complex shaded hierarchical geometry. The system has been most recently used in "The Smurfs" movie to populate a village with plants, flowers, and grass.

François Chardavoine
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Armin Bruderlin
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Making Faces: Eve Online’s New Portrait Rendering

Tthe portrait system that drives Eve Online's new high-fidelity avatars. Breaking down the final image into its components, this talk surveys the various techniques (including some that didn't work out) for real-time skin, eyes, hair, and shadows on commodity graphics hardware.

Bert Peers
CCP Games

SpeedFur: A GPU-Based Procedural Hair and Fur Modeling System

SpeedFur is a node-based procedural hair and fur modeling system that provides a GPU-accelerated real-time preview of the hair and renders on a traditional CPU-only render node.

Vilhelm Hedberg
Fido

Mattias Lagergren
Fido

Fredrik Limsäter
Fido

GPU Fluids in Production: A Compiler Approach to Parallelism

A language and heterogeneous compiler for efficiently solving structured grids on the CPU or the GPU, designed from the ground up with parallelism in mind.

Dan Bailey
Double Negative Visual Effects

Ian Masters
Double Negative Visual Effects

Matt Warner
Double Negative Visual Effects

SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community

Join us to discuss the year round activities of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, including online curated exhibitions, our virtual community, and discussions. Bring announcements and ideas.

Cynthia Beth Rubin
rubin (at) siggraph.org

SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community

A discussion of the year-round activities of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, including online curated exhibitions, our virtual community, and discussions. Bring announcements and ideas.

Cynthia Beth Rubin
rubin (at) siggraph.org

Blender Foundation: Artist showcase

Artists from past Blender Open Movie projects will give demos of work they did. This is an open-stage event for which everyone is invited to show work as well.

Blender Foundation
ton@blender.org

Standards in 3D Modeling: Case Study and Applications From Stock 3D

TurboSquid and Falling Pixel use a case study from the stock 3D industry as a lens to discuss the challenges presented by a lack of standards in 3D modeling as a whole.

An entertaining, illuminating summary of SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers in one exciting, fun-filled hour! The author(s) of each paper are allowed a little less than a minute to wow the crowd with their results and entice attendees to hear their complete paper presentation later in the week.

Taipei ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter Reunion

This session is for attendees from Taiwan and everyone interested in graphics research or the computer graphics industry in Taiwan.

Bing-Yu Chen
robin (at) ntu.edu.tw

NVIDIA Exhibitor Session: Advanced Rendering Solutions

Test drive current game-development technologies, explore game design, and play the games that are defining the next generation of digital interactivity.

PhysBAM: Physically Based Simulation

This course is as an introduction to the PhysBAM simulation library developed at Stanford University and used in both academic and industrial settings, including Intel Corporation, Industrial Light & Magic, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Pixar Animation Studios. The course contains information on the release of PhysBAM as well as information on how to obtain the source code, set up the library, and use it to run example smoke and water simulations. It also summarizes a visualization tool and a rendering tool included in the release of the library.

Physically based simulation is a vital part of the special-effects toolkit. Traditionally, special effects are obtained by constructing scale or full-size models, whether the scene calls for a sinking ship or a burning building. Unfortunately, this is very expensive and at times not feasible. Physical simulation is also used for special effects in animated films,
where traditional special effects methods cannot easily be applied. And it is increasingly used in the gaming community as enhanced processing power enables simulations to occur at real-time rates.

In addition to the PhysBAM library, the course explains the underlying techniques that make these simulations possible, in particular level set methods such as fast marching, fast sweeping, and the particle level set method. It also addresses the important aspects of a fluid simulation, including advection, viscosity, and projection.

COURSE SCHEDULE

9 am
The New Intel Center I
Dubey

9:10 am
The New Intel Center II
Hanrahan

9:20 am
The New Intel Center III.
Fedkiw

9:35 am
PhysBAM Tools Library
Lentine

10:15 am
PhysBAM Geometry Library
Schroeder

10:55 am
Level Set Algorithms
Schroeder

11:40 am
Water Simulation
Schroeder

New and Used Cars

This talk presents three shading innovations developed for the film "Cars 2": a layering method that is efficient and flexible, a procedural metal-flake illumination model that approximates the complex properties of modern car paint, and a new model for rendering reflection-aligned concentric micro-scratches.

Philip Child
Pixar Animation Studios

Junyi Ling
Pixar Animation Studios

Alex Seiden
Pixar Animation Studios

Getting Started in Maya

The first half of this workshop focuses on navigating the user interface, layout, basic tools, and panels in Maya. The second half focuses on how to use simple primitives to create projects and basic objects, and how to place objects in a scene.

Sujan Shrestha
Towson University

ShadowDraw: Real-Time User Guidance for Freehand Drawing

ShadowDraw, a system for guiding the freeform drawing of objects. As the user draws, ShadowDraw dynamically updates a shadow image underlying the user's strokes. The shadows suggest object contours to guide the drawing process.

Yong Jae Lee
University of Texas at Austin

C. Zitnick
Microsoft Research

Michael Cohen
Microsoft Research

Physically Valid Statistical Models for Human Motion Generation

This paper shows how statistical modeling techniques can be combined with physics-based modeling techniques to address the limitations of both techniques. The power of this new model is generated by a wide range of physically realistic motions that achieve goals specified by the users.

The course reviews historical and perceptual aspects, emphasizing the goal of achieving disparity, motion parallax, accommodation, and convergence cues without glasses. It summarizes state-of-the-art methods and areas of active research. And it provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to construct a lenticular display. The course concludes with an extended question-and-answer session, during which prototype hardware is available for inspection.

COURSE SCHEDULE

9 am
Introduction: History and Physiology
Hirsch

9:15 am
Constructing Glasses-Free 3D Displays
Lanman

9:30 am
Multi-View Rendering Using OpenGL
Hirsch

9:45 am
Multi-View Interlacing Using GLSL
Lanman

10 am
Designing Content for Glasses-Free 3D Displays
Hirsch

10:10 am
Emerging Technology
Lanman

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part I

Advances in real-time graphics research and the ever-increasing power of mainstream GPUs and consoles continue to generate an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds. Every year, the latest video games employ a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce ground-breaking 3D rendering that pushs the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments.

This course is the next installment in the established series of SIGGRAPH courses on real-time rendering. It summarizes the best graphics practices and research from the game-development community and provides practical and production-proven algorithms. The first part of the course includes speakers from the makers of several award-winning games, such as Bungie, Media Molecule, Crytek, and Avalanche. Topics include practical methods of real game-rendering pipelines, deferred rendering improvements, complex lighting techniques, scene voxelization and participating media, and other exciting production secrets. The focus is on the intersection between the game-development community and state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, and the potential for cross-pollination of knowledge in future games and other interactive applications.

3D Motion Graphics With Photoshop and After Effects

In this exploration of a 3D motion-graphics production pipeline between Photoshop and After Effects, attendees learn basic file translation and organization techniques, camera and rig setup, and animation techniques.

Brian Phillips
The Basement Design + Motion

OverCoat: An Implicit Canvas for 3D Painting

OverCoat is a 3D painting system that allows the user to treat the full 3D space as a canvas. Paint strokes applied in 2D are embedded in a 3D scalar field that is shaped by proxy geometry, and rendered such that the result always looks like a 2D digital painting.

Johannes Schmid
ETH Zürich, Disney Research Zürich

Martin Sebastian Senn
ETH Zürich, Disney Research Zürich

Markus Gross
ETH Zürich, Disney Research Zürich

Robert Sumner
Disney Research Zürich

Motion Capture From Body-Mounted Cameras

A wearable motion capture system that uses mounted cameras in natural environments.

Takaaki Shiratori
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Hyun Soo Park
Carnegie Mellon University

Leonid Sigal
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Yaser Sheikh
Carnegie Mellon University

Jessica Hodgins
Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh

A Programmable System for Artistic Volumetric Lighting

Designing and shading volumetric effects in feature-films is a difficult problem. This system, modeled after the way expert artists think about participating media, allows for intuitive control and authoring of both physically accurate and non-physical, artistic volumetric effects.

Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Disney Research Zürich

Jared Johnson
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Andrew Selle
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Dylan Lacewell
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Michael Kaschalk
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Wojciech Jarosz
Disney Research Zürich

Motion Reconstruction Using Sparse Accelerometer Data

A novel framework for generating full-body animations controlled by only four 3D accelerometers that are attached to the extremities of a human actor. This approach relies on a knowledge base that consists of a large number of motion clips obtained from marker-based motion capturing.

This paper presents a new data-driven approach for image-based synthesis of realistic video animations containing user-defined human motions seen from user-defined camera views.

Feng Xu
Tsinghua University

Yebin Liu
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

Carsten Stoll
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

James Tompkin
University College London

Gaurav Bharaj
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

QiongHai Dai
Tsinghua University

Hans-Peter Seidel
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

Jan Kautz
University College London

Christian Theobalt
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik

The Spirit of "Rango": Dissection of Character Animation and Rigging

"Rango" presented many challenges: the number of characters and their realism, complexity, and unique stylized look had probably never been achieved before in an animated feature. This talk provides a broad overview of the workflow and tools that were used for rigging and animating the characters.

Julien Cohen Bengio
Industrial Light & Magic

Kevin Martel
Industrial Light & Magic

Brian Paik
Industrial Light & Magic

Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH: We Make It Home

Vancouver has long been a hub for the CG industry. This talk showcases the talent from the vibrant, passionate local community and offers a glimpse into what you can expect at one of our inspiring presentations. Welcome to our city, SIGGRAPH 2011!

NVIDIA Exhibitor Session: OpenGL & CUDA Based Tessellation

Digital Clothing: A New Paradighm for Fashion

The study of physically based reproduction of clothing has made striking improvements over the past decade. Digitally simulated versions of clothes, generated with a single personal computer, now look more real than most people would expect for computer-generated animations. In the past, clothing simulation remained in the realm of movie and game production. Now, thanks to additional fashion-specific developments, the technology is on the verge of leading a revolutionary change in the fashion industry.

This talk summarizes the current state of the art of digital clothing technology: a collection of modeling, animation, and rendering systems targeted to fashion and animation production. The Studio features hands-on-experience classes associated with this presentation: the short class Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show (two sessions) and the long class Advanced Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show (one session).

Kathi Martin
Drexel University

Hyeong-Seok Ko
Seoul National University

Creating a Multi-Platform Real-Time Portfolio for Your Artwork Using Unity

This session gives attendees all the tools they need to move their real-time art from their 3D app of choice into Unity and deploy it to a web browser, mobile, device, or stand-alone device in simple, artist-friendly steps. No programming knowledge required.

Joe Robins
Unity Technologies

Digital Abstract Art With RealFlow and Maya

This session demonstates how to use Nextlimit RealFlow to construct an abstract water simulation, then move that mesh into Autodesk Maya for rendering of a single frame and into Photoshop for compositing.

David Ortel

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Wired, and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He was formerly director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. He is a visiting senior lecturer at Open University (UK) and previously served as the Fulbright chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

In 2008, his novel, Little Brother, was a New York Times best seller. Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays called Content: Selected Essays in Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Doctorow’s latest works include an adult novel, Maker, published by Tor Books/HarperCollins UK; For the Win, a young adult book about video games, labor politics, and economics; and a short story collection entitled Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.

He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open-source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText, Inc. in 2003. He serves on the boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.

3D Color Printing Using ZCorp Rapid Prototyping

Creating Cool Games Without a Programmer

This session shows how artists without any programming knowledge can create fun and entertaining games with Unity. Using simple scripts and a modular approach, the session gives artists and programmers a good overview of the main Unity workflow.

Roald Høyer-Hansen
Unity Technologies

Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show

Did you ever dream of showing your fashion design on a body of your own creation on the fashion runway? In this workshop, attendees learn how to use the Digital Clothing Suite's human character and pattern data to seam patterns, simulate garment draping, apply and manipulate images to generate their own textile designs, and save the final result into an animation clip. The clips are shown in The Studio, where attendees vote on their favorite designs. The best designer receives a six-month free trial of the Digital Clothing Suite.

Kathi Martin
Drexel University

Hyeong-Seok Ko
Seoul National University

The Beauty of Black and White

How to master black and white in Adobe CS5: from techniques for converting photos or 3D to masterful black-and-white illustrations to using Photoshop tools in ways they were not intended to create fantastic results.

Brian Haberlin
Haberlin Studios

NVIDIA Exhibitor Session: Using the GPU to Create a Seamless Display From Multiple Projectors

Daily Art Tours

Members of the Art Galley committee offer 30-minute guided tours to introduce visitors to Tracing Home and some of the specific artworks displayed in the exhibition. The daily tours begin in the Art Gallery.

The Technology-Creativity Ratio

If your daily work is related to media and entertainment software, how can you make sure you have the right computer to match your creative potential? Do you know the difference between a desktop, a notebook, and a workstation? Do you understand how CPUs, GPUs, and other technology components can affect the results you need to set yourself apart by reaching your creative vision as quickly as possible?

Scott Hamilton, Media and Entertainment Market Strategist at Dell and former Autodesk Technical Specialists Manager, shares his insights on how to choose the best workstation for typical applications such as computer graphics animation, effects, and editing.

The Visual Effects of "Thor" and "Captain America": So Different Yet So Marvel

Marvel Studios devotes great time and effort to deliver great storytelling, strong visuals and compelling characters to movie audiences. This session compares the films "Thor" and "Captain America" and shows how visual effects are a critical aesthetic ingredient in their success. Visual effects supervisors Wesley Sewell and Christopher Townsend and their teams from Digital Domain, Double Negative, Whiskytree, Luma Pictures, and Lola VFX review how the films combine beauty and authenticity.

Procedural Mosaic Arrangement In "Rio"

This talk explains how Blue Sky Studios created iterative, procedurally arranged tile mosaics in the sidewalks and streets of Rio de Janeiro. The was designed to be highly directable. It had to be automated yet nimble enough to achieve evolving production goals.

Rhett Collier
Blue Sky Studios

Josh Smeltzer
Blue Sky Studios

Exploration of Continuous Variability in Collections of 3D Shapes

This paper proposes a new technique for exploring unorganized collections of 3D shapes. The approach represents the variability in the collection as a constrained deformation model of a base template shape, which the user can directly manipulate to explore the set of shapes.

Maks Ovsjanikov
Stanford University

Wilmot Li
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Leonidas Guibas
Stanford University

Niloy J. Mitra
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Storytelling With Color

Color is mysterious, emotional, enigmatic. Opinions are strong about what they mean, or do not mean. Theses have been written about the emotional significance of color in film, psychology, and clothing. This course discusses storytelling choices in fine art, illustration, and films (animated and live action), and how color selection supports the story. Topics include color rules, when and how to break them, and the differences between the analog and digital palettes. The course includes plenty of visuals and is appropriate for everyone interested in color.

MakerBot

There is no machine more steam-punk than the MakerBot Industries Thing-O-Matic 3D printer. Between five and 10 machines are available for autonomous printing on demand in The Studio.

Adam Mayer
MakerBot Industries

From Concept to Creation

This is a hands-on workshop on digital fine art creation and perfecting your final print.

Stephen Burns, the author of CS5 Trickery & FX takes you on a journey of creative possibilities to fine art creation. He shares digital creative techniques and how to optimize your imagery for successful final output. Jack Duganne, the originator of the printmaking term giclée, summarizes the process of digitally printing your final version.

Stephen Burns
Chrome Allusion

MotorStorm Apocalypse: Creating Urban Off-Road Racing

This talk illustrates improvements and additions to the render pipeline and the tools pipeline to enable fast, slick game play mixed with cinematic explosions and dynamic events to produce the most visceral, exciting racing title possible.

Alex Perkins
Evolution Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Dan Hawson
Evolution Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Dynamic 3D & Photoshop Integration

How to creatively integrate 3D models into Photoshop CS5 Extended to create concept art. This session focuses on how to import, texture, and build a mate painting with third-party 3D models in CS5.

Stephen Burns
The San Diego Photoshop Users Group

Cortex Open-Source Framework

For current and prospective users of the Cortex open-source framework for visual effects software development.

John Haddon
john (at) image-engine.com

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part 2

Advances in real-time graphics research and the ever-increasing power of mainstream GPUs and consoles continue to generate an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds. Every year, the latest video games employ a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce ground-breaking 3D rendering that pushs the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments.

This course is the next installment in the established series of SIGGRAPH courses on real-time rendering. It summarizes the best graphics practices and research from the game-development community and provides practical and production-proven algorithms. The first part of the course includes speakers from the makers of several award-winning games, such as Electronic Arts (Vancouver, Montréal, and Black Box), Treyarch, Sony Online, and CCP Games. The focus is on the intersection between the game-development community and state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, and the potential for cross-pollination of knowledge in future games and other interactive applications.

ACM SIGGRAPH Award Talks

Generating Displacement From Normal Map for Use in 3D Games

This algorithm can automatically convert normal map to displacement map to reduce the cost of creating tessellated 3D game assets.

Kirill Dmitriev
NVIDIA Corporation

Evgeny Makarov
NVIDIA Corporation

Characterizing Structural Relationships in Scenes Using Graph Kernels

This paper shows how to represent scenes as graphs that encode models and their semantic relationships. It then defines a kernel between these relationship graphs that compares common virtual substructures in two graphs and captures the similarity between their corresponding scenes.

Matthew Fisher
Stanford University

Manolis Savva
Stanford University

Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University

Interactive Hybrid Simulation of Large-Scale Traffic

A method for integrating disparate traffic-simulation techniques that allows for interactive, large-scale visualizations of traffic flow without compromising quality. The approach uses both agent-based and continuum techniques to balance user needs and achieve a high level of performance.

Jason Sewall
Intel Corporation

David Wilkie
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ming Lin
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Per-Face Texture Mapping for Real-Time Rendering

Originally invented for offline rendering, this technique for rendering per-face texture-mapping datasets in real-time on commodity Direct3D 11 hardware eliminates the texture-unwrap step of the art creation process while producing an image that avoids texture discontinuities frequently found in models.

John McDonald
NVIDIA Corporation

Brent Burley
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Probabilistic Reasoning for Assembly-Based 3D Modeling

A probabilistic model of shape structure that encodes semantic and geometric relationships among shape components. The model is trained on a shape database and is used to present relevant components during interactive 3D modeling.

The ability to direct a viewer’s gaze about a scene has important applications in computer graphics and data visualization. This talk describes an experiment designed to study the impact of subtle gaze manipulation on short-term spatial information recall.

Reynold Bailey
Rochester Institute of Technology

Ann McNamara
Texas A&M University

Aaron Costello
Rochester Institute of Technology

Cindy Grimm
Washington University in St. Louis

Spherical Skinning With Dual Quaternions and QTangents

Building upon previous work on dual quaternion skinning, and with the introduction of a new way to represent tangent frames (QTangent), this talk presents improvements to quality, performance, and memory footprint of skinned geometry achieved during development of the Crysis franchise.

Facial Cartography: Interactive High-Resolution Scan Correspondence

A technique for high-resolution correspondence of independent facial expression scans, incorporating inverse rendering, GPU computation, and real-time user direction during the optimization; corresponded expression data are mapped into a common domain for use in realistic facial animation.

Cyrus Wilson
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Oleg Alexander
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Borom Tunwattanapong
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Pieter Peers
College of William and Mary

Abhijeet Ghosh
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Jay Busch
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Arno Hartholt
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Paul Debevec
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

French Animation Showcase - Session 1

Come and enjoy a selection of state-of-the art animation films from the best French schools and artists! A selection by Annie Dissaux - AFCA. Networking opportunities after the session.

2020 3D Media Ongoing Research

2020 3D Media is researching new ways of capturing, producing, and exhibiting S3D and immersive audiovisual content. This interdisciplinary meeting presents the approach and first results.

Santi Fort
santi.fort (at) barcelonamedia.org

Embroidery Modeling and Rendering in Real Time

Techniques for automatically producing embroidery layouts from line drawings and rendering those layouts in real time on potentially deformable 3D objects with hardware acceleration.

Xinling Chen
University of Waterloo

NVIDIA Exhibitor Session: Tools for Mobile Photography and Vision

HDR-VDP-2: A Calibrated Visual Metrics for Visibility and Quality Predictions in All Luminance Conditions

A metric for predicting visible differences (discrimination) and image quality (MOS) in high-dynamic-range images. The metric is based on new contrast sensitivity measurements and calibrated against several datasets. The visibility predictions are shown to be improved compared to the original HDR-VDP and VDP metrics.

Rafal Mantiuk
Bangor University

Kil Joong Kim
Seoul National University

Allan Rempel
The University of British Columbia

Wolfgang Heidrich
The University of British Columbia

Rapid Solutions to 3D Scanning

Michael Raphael
Direct Dimensions, Inc.

The Need for Standardization Within Global Visual Effects Productions Through Open Source and Open Standards

This panel highlights some of the open-source projects that are helping visual-effects companies share data worldwide and explore areas for future improvement. In most cases, production companies need to set up a hub to ingest data from sets and/or locations during principal photography, and then send and receive data from the various visual-effects vendors during post production. Because there is not much standardization in this area, a standard framework for information exchange could provide huge efficiencies for both production companies and vendors. The panel explores options for sharing assets such as plates, models, and textures as well as new issues related to stereo conversion.

How to Write Fast iPhone and Android Shaders in Unity

This in-depth session on how to make shaders as fast as possible on mobile platforms explains basic graphics optimization techniques for mobile GPUs, Unity’s rendering and lighting pipeline, and how to use it effectively. For programmers and technical artists.

Aras Pranckevicius
Unity Technologies

Cross-Platform Concept Illustration

Using multiple software suites and tools in 2D and 3D in tandem to quickly create concept illustrations.

Demian Moon Stevens

Eulerian Solid Simulation With Contact

A new method for simulating realistic behavior of highly deformed, interacting solids without requiring explicit representation of the objects themselves.

David I.W. Levin
The University of British Columbia

Joshua Litven
The University of British Columbia

Garrett L. Jones
The University of British Columbia

Shinjiro Sueda
The University of British Columbia

Dinesh K. Pai
The University of British Columbia

Design and Realization of Stereoscopic 3D for Disney Classics

The stereoscopic conversions of Disney's "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast" required development of novel techniques for art direction, editing, and visualization of 3D stereoscopic depth without the use of geometric models.

Evan Goldberg
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Robert Neuman
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Matthew Schnittker
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Dale Mayeda
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Olun Riley
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Kevin Koneval
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Katie Tucker-Fico
Walt Disney Animation Studios

A Versatile HDR Video Production System

An optical architecture for HDR imaging that allows simultaneous capture of high-, medium-, and low-exposure images, and an HDR merging algorithm that avoids undesired artifacts. This paper explains implementation of a prototype HDR-video system and present sresults from the acquired HDR video.

Efficient Elasticity for Character Skinning With Contact and Collisions

A new and efficient algorithm for skinning skeleton-driven physically based elasticity. The algorithm and implementation are designed for efficiency with parallelism, matrix-free solvers, and branch-free vectorized and multi-threaded SVD computation. The paper demonstrates the system on real-world examples with contact and collisions.

Eftychios Sifakis
University of Wisconsin-Madison and Walt Disney Animation Studios

StereoFX: Survey of the Main Stereo Film-Making Techniques

CANCELLED

A concrete survey of stereo film-making techniques based on three recent Moving Picture Company projects.

Damien Fagnou
The Moving Picture Company

Perceptually Based Tone Mapping for Low Light Conditions

A perceptually based algorithm for modeling the color shift that occurs for human viewers in low-light scenes. Known as the Purkinje effect, this color shift occurs as the eye transitions from photopic, cone-mediated vision in well-lit scenes to scotopic, rod-mediated vision in dark scenes.

Developing Tools for 2D/3D Conversion of Japanese Animations

Production of "Inazuma Eleven: the Movie" required a set of new tools to enable conversion from Japanese animation to 3D stereoscopic movie. This talk summarizes those in-house tools and how OLM used Japanese animation specificity to build up an efficient conversion system.

Changing the color of an object is a basic image-editing operation, but a high-quality result must also preserve natural shading. This approach decomposes illumination into direct lighting and indirect illumination from individual materials to consistently modify material colors and their associated interreflections.

This paper focuses on the challenging problem of simulating frictional contact between thin elastic rods. Following the seminal work by Alart and Curnier in contact mechanics, this work simultaneously models contact and exact Coulomb friction as a root-finding problem that can be simply solved using a nonsmooth Newton algorithm.

Florence Bertails-Descoubes
INRIA

Florent Cadoux
INRIA

Gilles Daviet
INRIA

Vincent Acary
INRIA

Processing.js: Sketching With Canvas

Processing.js 1.0, a complete port of the Processing language, brings interactive 2D and 3D graphics to the web without the use of plug-ins.

Andor Salga
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Daniel Hodgin
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Anna Sobiepanek
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Scott Downe
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Mickael Medel
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Catherine Leung
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology

Large-Scale Dynamic Simulation of Highly Constrained Strands

A new framework for the simulation of constrained strands, which combines Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches. The two contributions are the reduced node, whose degrees of freedom precisely match the constraint, and the Eulerian node, which allows constraint handling that is independent of the initial discretization of the strand.

Shinjiro Sueda
The University of British Columbia

Garrett L. Jones
The University of British Columbia

David I. W. Levin
The University of British Columbia

Dinesh K. Pai
The University of British Columbia

Tracing Home participating artists casually explain and discuss their works, process, and ideas . These talks are followed by short Q & A sessions and an opportunity to meet and chat with the artists. All talks are presented in the Art Gallery.

In recent years, several activities and foundations have generated large improvements in the general graphics community in Austria. This talk presents endeavors that culminated in the internet forum CGForum.at, the international PIXEL conference, and the Interest Group on Computer Graphics.

Christoph Staber
Kris (at) arxanima.com

Ralf Habel
Ralf (at) cg.tuwien.ac.at

Per-Face Texture Mapping for Real-Time Rendering

This technique renders texture-seam-free meshes without unwrapping the model into UV space at interactive frame rates.

John McDonald
NVIDIA Corporation

Brent Burley
Walt Disney Animation Studios

NVIDIA Exhibitor Session: GPU Ray Tracing

CG in Asia

An overview of the state of CG in Asia, including the evolution of SIGGRAPH Asia. The Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 summarizes the upcoming conference in December in Hong Kong.

Lee Yong Tsui
MYTLEE (at) ntu.edu.sg

ACCAD/Ohio State University Alumni Gathering

This reception is for alumni of The Ohio State University who studied at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design (ACCAD), the Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) and/or worked at Cranston/Csuri Productions.

Elaine Smith
elaine (at) accad.osu.edu

Encontro dos Brasileiros 2011

This session is for attendees interested in computer graphics in Brazil who want to exchange experiences and meet some friends!

Luiz Garrido
cad (at) luizgarrido.com

Blending of Transforms With Non-Uniform Parent Scale

Imageworks' parent constraint spXformInterp optimally blends multiple transformations while correctly handling the shear induced when rotation is followed by non-uniform scale, and it can do so in an arbitrary space. This is particularly important with forward/inverse kinematics and motion capture, where several redundant skeletons and multiple constraints would otherwise be needed.

Daniel Weston
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Linux and Graphics Pipeline Tools

This session may be interesting to those who are building grapics pipelines on Linux and encountering difficulties associated with products, QT versions, python versions, gcc, etc.

Kevin Gambrel
kevin.p.gambrel (at) disney.com

The 24th Anniversary CG Show and SAKE Barrel Opening Party at SIGGRAPH 2011

For attendees interested in the CG Show of Yoichiro Kawaguchi, an established Japanese CG artist, and those who would like to reunite or socialize with other attendees.

Yoichiro Kawaguchi
k-yoshida (at) iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Prop Building for VFX

Learn how custom effects and props are built, how they can assist VFX, the processes that go into modern prop building (from laser cutting to CNC and 3D printing), how to use props to provide supplemental lighting and reference, and how to combine these disciplines to create new effects.

Dallas Luther
Maker Faire Vancouver

Studio Views of Student Demo Reels

Industry professionals from various computer animation and visual effects facilities explain what they (and their studios) look for when reviewing demo reels and portfolios of students and recent graduates.

Rigging Characters for CryENGINE

How to rig, skin, and export a character for CryENGINE 3. Topics include physics setup, building characters from many skinned meshes, and creating Character Definitions and Character Parameter files. These rigging basics are applicable to most run-time game engines.

Chris Evans
CryENGINE

Blue-Noise Point Sampling Using Kernel Density Model

A new method for generating spatially varying stochastic-point distributions with blue-noise spectrum in linear time. The method relies on a novel multi-scale strategy that draws samples from an interacting particles statistical model that formalizes the problem.

Raanan Fattal
Hebrew University

Google Body: 3D Human Anatomy in the Browser

Google Body provides an intuitive 3D context for learning and discussing human anatomy on a browser, smart phone or tablet. It allows the user to peel away layers of anatomy, rotate and zoom, navigate, and search, all without a plug-in because of the WebGL standard and efficient data transmission.

Arthur Blume
Google, Inc.

Won Chun
Google, Inc.

David Kogan
Google, Inc.

Vangelis Kokkevis
Google, Inc.

Nico Weber
Google, Inc.

Rachel Weinstein Petterson
Google, Inc.

Roni Zeiger
Google, Inc.

"Rango": A Case of Lighting and Compositing a CG-Animated Feature in an FX-Oriented Facility

A summary of some of the tricks, tools, setups, and procedures used by lighting and compositing artists at Industrial Light & Magic in the production of the animated feature "Rango".

Leandro Estebecorena
Industrial Light & Magic

Nelson Sepulveda
Industrial Light & Magic

Greg Grusby
Industrial Light & Magic

Conserving Digital Art for Deep Time

Displaying digital art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries can be challenging. Exhibiting this same art in the distant future may be impossible, unless today's artists, conservators, and curators adopt new thinking and practices. Established software engineering methods for dealing with aging systems can provide a new model for conservation of digital art and a foundation for enhancement of art history scholarship.

Francis Marchese
Pace Univeristy

Creating Characters With Character

How to create a cast of thousands of stylish characters with off-the-shelf assets using Poser Pro2010 and Zbrush.

Brian Haberlin
Haberlin Studios

Computer Graphics in the Washington DC Area

A brief talk about the Washington-area computer graphics market, and some of the activities carried out by the Washington DC ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter, showcasing a reel of work by our members at NASA and the National Transportation Safety Board.

This meeting is for studio instructors and industry advisors associated with the NSF CreativeIT research project, Collaborative Undergraduate Computing Studios Facilitating Decentralized Participation.

Margaret Lomas Carpenter
marge (at) viz.tamu.edu

Building Volumetric Appearance Models of Fabric Using Micro CT Imaging

This paper builds volume-appearance models based on density data from X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans and appearance data from photographs under uncontrolled illumination. The resulting models show extreme detail in closeups, while at larger scales the distinctive textures and highlights of a range of fabrics emerge automatically.

Shuang Zhao
Cornell University

Wenzel Jakob
Cornell University

Steve Marschner
Cornell University

Kavita Bala
Cornell University

Beyond Programmable Shading I

There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics programming is a more flexible model than today’s OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. Graphics developers need to have a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques and more flexible graphics processors with the traditional interactive-rendering pipeline.

As the first in a series, this course introduces trends and directions in this emerging field: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and how game developers are investigating the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines.

This session is for attendees who are interested in animation and computer graphics education at all levels. It includes an open discussion led by educators and an opportunity to network.

Dori Littell-Herrick
dori.littell-herrick (at) woodbury.edu

Efficient Maximal Poisson-Disk Sampling

This paper solves the problem of generating a uniform Poisson-disk sampling that is both maximal and unbiased over bounded non-convex domains. The method is fast, requires little memory, and is guaranteed to terminate without any bias. The paper also demonstrates a parallel GPU implementation that performs MPS in a bias-free fashion.

This novel algorithm to interactively compute indirect illumination is based on a filtered voxel octree representation of the scene used as a proxy for lighting information and coupled with an approximate voxel cone tracing that allows a fast estimation of the visibility and incoming energy.

Cyril Crassin
INRIA Rhone-Alpes

Fabrice Neyret
CNRS/LJK/INRIA

Miguel Sainz
NVIDIA Corporation

Simon Green
NVIDIA Corporation

Elmar Eisemann
École d'Ingénieurs Télécom ParisTech

Ocean Mission on "Cars 2"

The challenges and solutions across multiple disciplines in addressing integration of an ocean with characters and lighting in the fast-paced opening action sequence of "Cars 2".

Alexis Angelidis
Pixar Animation Studios

Josh Anon
Pixar Animation Studios

Gary Bruins
Pixar Animation Studios

Jon Reisch
Pixar Animation Studios

Esdras Varagnolo
Pixar Animation Studios

Shadow Awareness: Enhancing Theater Space Through the Mutual Projection of Images on a Connective Slit Screen

This study presents media technology that enables improvisational and continuous creation of performers' physical expression as they are inspired by the imagery evoked from the audience. To realize this, the authors focus on "shadow media", a system that promotes continuous creation of imagery through "bodily awareness". The system projects shadows of the performers, which are then transformed into various shapes and colors. The shadows are connected to the performers' feet and projected on a "passable" slit screen set up between the stage and the audience. The result demonstrates that interactive and mutual creation of imagery from performers and audience can form an "empathetic" stage. To demonstrate its validity, the system was applied to a dance performance at Festival della Scienza in Genoa, Italy.

Yoshiyuki Miwa
Waseda university

Shiroh Itai
Waseda University

Takabumi Watanabe
Waseda University

Hiroko Nishi
Toyo Eiwa University

Pocket Reflectometry

A simple, fast solution for reflectance acquisition with a BRDF chart, a linear light source, and a video camera on a mobile phone. Convincing svBRDF results are obtained after less than 30 seconds of data capture in casual environments.

Peiran Ren
Tsinghua University

Jiaping Wang
Microsoft Research Asia

John Snyder
Microsoft Research

Xin Tong
Microsoft Research Asia

Baining Guo
Microsoft Research Asia

Differential Domain Analysis for Non-Uniform Sampling

Existing spatial and spectral methods for analyzing sample distributions are restricted to uniform domains. This paper presents differential domain analysis for general non-uniform scenarios including adaptive, anisotropic, and surface sampling, by reformulating standard Fourier analysis that depends on sample locations into an equivalent form that depends on only location differentials.

Li-Yi Wei
Microsoft Research

Rui Wang
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Rendering the Interactive Dynamic Natural World of the Game: From Dust

CANCELLED

From Dust is a new game for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC developed at Ubisoft Montpellier. It features a fully dynamic world where sand, water, lava, and vegetation are constantly evolving and ruled by a realistic simulation.

Ronan Bel
Ubisoft Montpellier Studio

Benoît Vimont
Ubisoft Montpellier Studio

Untangling Hair Rendering at Disney

This talk discusses the challenge of rendering hair on Disney's "Tangled". After a review of the shader, it examines the initial problems faced by artists, the extensive developments to resolve them, and how those tools produced the final look and contributions to future productions.

Lewis Siegel
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Ramon Montoya-Vozmediano
DreamWorks Animation

Michelle Robinson
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Mitchell Snary
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Ryan Duncan
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Chris Springfield
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Collaboration With the Future: An Infrastructure for Art+Technology at the San José International Airport

This paper summarizes development and implementation of a three-part infrastructure for the ongoing program of technology-based public artwork at Silicon Valley’s newly expanded airport. The physical, technological, and human infrastructure provides flexibility and opportunities for future artists and future technologies while providing a robust framework for ongoing maintenance and evolution of the program, and mediating between the needs of artists and the constraints of an airport.

Matt Gorbet
Gorbet Design, Inc.

Susan Gorbet
Gorbet Design, Inc.

Banny Banerjee
Stanford University

Microgeometry Capture Using an Elastomeric Sensor

This paper describes a system for measuring microscopic surface geometry using an elastomeric sensor and a single camera. The system is not affected by the optical characteristics of the surface and can be configured as a portable device. Results from a variety of real-world materials are presented.

Micah Johnson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Forrester Cole
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alvin Raj
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Edward Adelson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Filtering Solid Gabor Noise

Existing noise functions either introduce discontinuities of the solid noise at sharp edges (wavelet noise, Gabor noise) or result in detail loss when anti-aliased (Perlin noise, wavelet noise). This paper presents a new noise function that preserves continuity over sharp edges and supports high-quality anti-aliasing.

Art and Code: The Aesthetic Legacy of Aldo Giorgini

Working extensively as both artist and scientist, Aldo Giorgini was one of the first computer artists to combine software writing with early printing technologies. His innovative process consisted of producing pen-plotted drawings embellished by painting, drawing and screen-printing. In 1975, he developed a FORTRAN program called FIELDS, a numerical visual laboratory devoted entirely to art production.

This paper, the product of a multi-year study of Giorgini’s primary source materials provided by his estate, examines the methods he used during the 1970s to create computer-aided art. It is an attempt to ensure that future generations of digital artists, technologists, and scientists can learn about Giorgini’s aesthetic legacy and its contribution to the history of digital art.

Esteban Garcia
Purdue University

David Whittinghill
Purdue University

CATRA: Interactive Measuring and Modeling of Cataracts

A novel interactive method to assess cataracts in the human eye by crafting an optical solution that measures the perceptual impact of forward scattering on the foveal region. The method goes beyond traditional evaluation procedures by computing maps for opacity, attenuation, contrast, and point-spread function of cataracts.

The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors

The Readers Project is an aesthetically oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or "readers", navigate texts according to specific reading strategies based on linguistic feature analysis and real-time probability models harvested from search engines. They function as autonomous text generators, writing machines that become visible within and beyond the typographic dimension of the texts on which they operate. The system has been deployed in a number of interactive art installations where the aggregate behavior of the readers can be viewed on a large screen, and viewers can subscribe, via mobile devices, to individual reader outputs. As the structures on which these readers operate are culturally and aesthetically implicated, they shed critical light on a range of institutional practices, particularly those of reading and writing, and explore what it means to engage with literary components in digital media.

This talk presents a system for capturing and stitching gigapixel-scale time-lapse imagery, and for exploring the resulting gigapixel-scale video in four dimensions: 2D translation, zoom, and time. Topics include algorithms for synthesis of gigapixel-scale video, server and client architectures that allow scalable real-time exploration via the web, gigapixel-scale time-lapse videos, and a breadth of applications.

Randy Sargent
Carnegie Mellon University

Exhibition

Costa Rica's CGI Business: Beyond the Rainforest and the Beach!

Costa Rica's growing computer graphics industry is reaching international markets. Discover the creative and innovative side of this thriving and natural country. Presenters include:

Itzamn Huelat
Foreign Trade Office of Costa Rica in Canada

Douglas Sánchez
Costa Rica Investment Promotion Agency

Gustavo Madrigal
Morpho Animation Studio

Itzamn Huelat
ihuelat (at) procomer.com

Special Effects With Depth

This session presents various graphics techniques using depth and normals buffers. The methods range from improving standard techniques such as particle effects to creating entirely new ones (for example, approximate volumetric effects), and advanced image post-processing. In many cases, the buffers used are natural products of the rendering pipeline and offer a way to infer a surprising volume of information about the scene, allowing for very rich and fast graphics effects. The session is designed for artists and programmers. It discusses the possibilities of the post-processing effects and their technical side.

Kuba Cupisz
Unity Technologies

Ole Ciliox
Unity Technologies

The XVJ (Xpressive Video-Jockey)

This XVJ session imagines the future of gesturally expressive video-jockeying. It goes beyond knobs and sliders to experiment with I-CubeX sensors, controllers, and input devices that capture more human movements to control audio-visual effects in real time, using Resolume and Live.

Pixar: "La Luna"

"La Luna" is the timeless fable of a young boy who is coming of age in the most peculiar of circumstances. Tonight is the very first time his Papa and Grandpa are taking him to work. In an old wooden boat, they row far out to sea, and with no land in sight, they stop and wait. A big surprise awaits the little boy as he discovers his family's most unusual line of work. Should he follow the example of his Papa, or his Grandpa? Will he be able to find his own way in the midst of their conflicting opinions and timeworn traditions?

Following the Canadian premiere screening of "La Luna", its director, Enrico Casarosa discusses the journey that led him to create this very personal short and demonstrates the singularly artistic style by which the film was crafted.

• A novel spatio-temporal anti-aliasing algorithm with essentially noise-free results. Visibility is solved for along line samples in screen space and in time.
• A new method for ambient occlusion based on line samples/ The method can also handle motion-blurred ambient occlusion.

A method to align locally detected RANSAC primitives using global relations, which are learned and conformed to using a combination of graph reduction and constrained optimization. The paper demonstrates applications on synthetic and scanned data, even under structured noise and anisotropic sampling.

Yangyan Li
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

Xiaokun Wu
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and Zhejiang University

Yiorgos Chrysanthou
University of Cyprus

Andrei Sharf
Ben-Gurion University and Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

3D Workflows in Photoshop Cs5 Extended

This summary of all the 3D features in Photoshop CS5 Extended demonstrates key 3D workflows that are important for every designer. Topics include: how 3D works in Photoshop (lights, cameras, materials, extrusions) and cool effects like depth of field, animations, image-based lights, and more!

A new frequency analysis and sheared filter for computing shadows cast by complex occluders. The approach uses ray tracing to sparsely sample the scene and a sheared 4D filter to share shadow samples between neighboring pixels.

In this paper, a method for reconstructing high-quality images from sparse stochastic samples is applied to simultaneous motion blur, depth of field, and soft shadows.

Jaakko Lehtinen
NVIDIA Research

Timo Aila
NVIDIA Research

Jiawen Chen
MIT CSAIL

Samuli Laine
NVIDIA Research

Frédo Durand
MIT CSAIL

Texture-Lobes for Tree Modeling

In this lobe-based tree representation for modeling trees, the tree’s foliage is abstracted into compact canonical geometry structures, called lobe-textures. The method introduces techniques to encode a given tree as lobe-based representation and decode the representation and synthesize a fully detailed tree model.

Yotam Livny
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

Soeren Pirk
Universität Konstanz

Zhanglin Cheng
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

Feilong Yan
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

Oliver Deussen
Universität Konstanz

Daniel Cohen-Or
Tel-Aviv University

Baoquan Chen
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology

Band Decomposition of 2-Manifold Meshes For Physical Construction of Large Structures

This talk introduces an approach for easy construction of unusually shaped large physical structures that are designed as 2-manifold mesh surfaces.

This proposed method, viewpoint hierarchy, offers a multiperspective rendering specialized to depict anime-like exaggeration of perspective of a figure model in accordance with camera motion and the figure's posture, using a tree structure of multiple cameras.

Kei Utsugi
Hitach, Ltd.

Takeshi Naemura
The University of Tokyo

Takafumi Koike
Hitachi, Ltd.

Michio Oikawa
Hitachi, Ltd.

The Area Perspective Transform: A Homogeneous Transform for Efficient In-Volume Queries

This paper introduces a homogeneous transform that reduces the computation required to determine the set of points or primitives inside a tetrahedral volume. It describes how application of this transform can improve the efficiency of soft shadows and defocus blur computations.

Warren Hunt
Intel Corporation

Gregory Johnson
University of Texas at Austin and Intel Corporation

ℓ1-Sparse Reconstruction of Sharp Point Set Surfaces

With this ℓ1-sparse reconstruction of piecewise smooth objects, common objects can be characterized by a small number of features that introduce sparsity into the model. The reconstruction gives rise to shapes that consist mainly of smooth modes, with the objective function residual concentrated near sharp features.

Haim Avron
Tel-Aviv University, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Andrei Sharf
Ben Gurion University

Chen Greif
The University of British Columbia

Daniel Cohen-Or
Tel-Aviv University

Pattern Mapping With Quad-Pattern-Coverable Quad Meshes

This work shows that it is possible to seamlessly cover any surface of positive genus periodically with plane symmetric tiles or aperiodically with Wang tiles.

Shiyu Hu
Texas A&M University

Qing Xing
Texas A&M University

Ergun Akleman
Texas A&M University

Jianer Chen
Texas A&M University

Jonathan Gross
Columbia University

Learning to Classify Human Object Sketches

This talk summarizes design of a large training dataset of over 5,000 human sketches in about 200 object categories and how classifiers were trained to accurately predict object categories for a large variety of sketches.

Mathias Eitz
Technischen Universität Berlin

James Hays
Brown University

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Video Processing With AMD FirePro Solutions
PC architecture and graphics-processing units have become ubiquitous in broadcast and post-production workflows. This talk reviews the types of processing and rendering that the GPU excels at and illuminates some of the emerging trends for tightening GPU integration into these workflows.

Ornate Screens

Ornament has been abolished by the avant-garde, and ornamentation has been replaced by material aesthetic. This talk argues that ornament is not a parergon, an unnecessary accessory, but that the parergon, the ornament, actually becomes the ergon, the main element.

Revolution Evolution: Forging Industrial-Academic Collaboration

This talk aims to emphasize the collaborative opportunities available to educators as a result of communication technology. A successful collaboration between Texas A&M and DreamWorks Animation serves as a case study.

Ann McNamara
Texas A&M University

David Walvoord
DreamWorks Animation

Marilyn Friedman
DreamWorks Animation

Jose Guinea Montalvo
Texas A&M University

ISEA International Foundation - Open Forum

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International Foundation (formerly Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science, and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art. Selection of ISEA symposia is made by the ISEA International Foundation Board.

This discussion includes information about the organization, the upcoming ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness, a symposium and series of events exploring the discourse of global proportions on the subject of art, technology, and nature. It also previews ISEA2013, in Sydney, Australia. All interested members of the electronic arts community are invited to learn about the future symposia and share ideas for potential organizational collaborations.

Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show

Did you ever dream of having your fashion design on a body of your own creation walking the fashion runway? In this class, which uses the Digital Clothing Suite software, human character and pattern data are given to the attendees so that they can learn how to seam patterns, simulate draping of the garment on a walking model, apply and manipulate different images to generate their own textile design, and save the final result into an animation clip. Your clips will be shown in The Studio during the conference. Conference attendees will vote on their favorite designs and the best designer will be awarded a six month free trial of the Digital Clothing Suite at the end of the conference. Participants are welcome to bring images/graphics to use for their custom textile design and to save their work on a flash drive to take home with them.

Kathi Martin
Drexel University

Hyeong-Seok Ko
Seoul National University

The Power of the (Wacom) Pen

This hands-on seminar explains the power of the pen! Everything from how to hold the pen to essential tips and techniques that the pros use to create their images, how to enhance your everyday tools with a pressure-sensitive pen, masking and painting capabilities that have been all but denied to mouse users, and how the tablet itself can improve productivity.

Wes Maggio
Wacom Co., Ltd.

ACM SIGGRAPH Carto BOF

This ACM SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization (Carto) sessioin explores how viewpoints and techniques from the computer graphics community can be effectively applied to cartographic and spatial datasets.

Theresa-Marie Rhyne
theresamarierhyne (at) gmail.com

StudioSysAdmins

This session encourages sharing of all non-proprietary information to maintain open discussions among studios, vendors and VARs to determine standards that will improve studio infrastructures.

John Hickson
john.hickson (at) studiosysadmins.com

Daily Art Tours

Members of the Art Galley committee offer 30-minute guided tours to introduce visitors to Tracing Home and some of the specific artworks displayed in the exhibition. The daily tours begin in the Art Gallery.

3D Medical Visualization Using X3D

Learn more about X3D Medical for 3D medical imaging in DIACOM and implementation of X3D Volume rendering.

Nicholas Polys
npolys (at) vt.edu

How to Capture Your Dream

Ping Fu, founder and CEO of Geomagic Inc., describes her journey from a computer science student to a computer graphics pioneer and ultimately an entrepreneur dedicated to advancing and applying 3D technology for the benefit of humanity. Her talk weaves technology, applications, and social impact to illustrate the importance of visual computing and its contribution to everyday life today and in the future.

Ping Fu
Geomagic Inc.

A Quantized-Diffusion Model for Rendering Translucent Materials

With these new techniques for rendering translucent materials such as human skin, modified diffusion theory and a new quantized-diffusion method derive efficient and accurate scattering functions for both offline and real-time rendering.

Eugene d'Eon
Weta Digital Ltd

Geoffrey Irving
Weta Digital Ltd

Web3D Consortium - Declarative 3D for the Web

Declarative 3D for the Web is a W3C Community Group that explores and suggests options for integrating a declarative approach to interactive 3D graphics directly into HTML, which enables its use in any web page.

Traditionally, modeling urban spaces has been a mostly manual task that consumes significant amounts of resources. With the growing requirements of quantity and quality in urban content, there is an imperative need for alternative solutions that allow for fast, semiautomatic urban modeling. This course explains new modeling techniques for urban environments as an important complement to traditional modeling software. It explains how to use procedural, image-based, and simulation-based techniques to efficiently create highly detailed three-dimensional urban models for computer games, movies, architecture, and urban planning.

Leonardo, Art Papers, and Art Gallery

Experience "home" in the networked age. Talk with the artists, designers, and Art Papers authors about their work. And meet the members of the SIGGRAPH 2011 committee who organized this year's Art Gallery.

Interactive and Anisotropic Geometry Processing Using the Screened Poisson Equation

A general framework for performing curvature-aware geometry processing through solution of a screened Poisson equation and a parallel streaming implementation for constructing and solving the associated linear system at interactive rates.

Michael Kazhdan
Johns Hopkins University

Ming Chuang
Johns Hopkins University

Fine Art Printmaking Workflow

A session with one of the original architects of digital fine art printmaking and the originator of the term “Giclée”.

Jack Duganne
Duganne Ateliers

Dynamic 3D & Photoshop Integration

How to creatively integrate 3D models into Photoshop CS5 Extended to create concept art. This session focuses on how to import, texture, and build a mate painting with third-party 3D models in CS5.

Stephen Burns
The San Diego Photoshop Users Group

DreamWorks Animation: The Yin and Yang of Creating the Final Battle in “Kung Fu Panda 2”

The climax of the CG-animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2” is an epic battle featuring a flotilla of boats, an ancient Chinese-styled city, thousands of wolves armed for battle, action featuring hundreds of characters in a single shot, stylized graphic lighting, fantastical cannon fire and explosions, and a set of effects-supported Kung Fu moves. This talk provides a unique insight into the making of a CG-animated movie that goes beyond the traditional idealized concept of the pipeline.

CG in Latino Countries

This overview of the state of CG in Latino countries includes a special presentation by various studios in Latin America, including 3D Animation Rocks, the largest animation school in Argentina, and a university in Chile. The session ends with a celebratory piñata.

Sandro Alberti
salberti (at) siggraph.org

Call for Contributions for the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications' New Education Department

Want to contribute an article to this department? Want to give valuable input on what YOU think should be printed there? Meet with the co-editors in this Birds of a Feather session.

Gitta Domik and G. Scott Owen
domik (at) uni-paderborn.de

Beyond Programmable Shading II

There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics programming is a more flexible model than today’s OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. Graphics developers need to have a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques and more flexible graphics processors with the traditional interactive-rendering pipeline.

As the second in a series, this course introduces trends and directions in this emerging field: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and how game developers are investigating the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines.

Advances in New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Advances in digital audio technologies have led to computers playing a role in most music production and performance. Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for creation and manipulation of sound, but the flexibilty of these new technologies provides an often confusing array of choices for composers and performers. A decade ago, the presenters of this course organized the first workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), to clarify this situation by exploring connections with the better-established field of human-computer interaction.

The course summarizes what has been learned at NIME. Topics include the theory and practice of new musical-interface design, mapping from human action to musical output, control intimacy, tools for creating musical interfaces, sensors and microcontrollers, audio synthesis techniques, and communication protocols such as Open Sound Control (and MIDI). The course presents several case studies focused on the major broad themes of the NIME conference, including augmented and sensor-based instruments, mobile and networked music, and NIME pedagogy.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction to NIME Tools, Design, and Aesthetics
Fels & Lyons

2:10 pm
Module 1: Building a NIME
Fels

2:40 pm
Module 2: Camera-Based Interfaces
Lyons

3 pm
Module 3: Design & Aesthetics of NIME
Lyons

3:20 pm
Break

3:50 pm
Module 4: NIME After NIME: Case Studies
Fels

4:20 pm
Module 5: NIME Theory
Lyons

4:40 pm
Module 6: NIME Education
Lyons

4:50 pm
Concluding Remarks
Fels & Lyons

5 pm
Discussion

Advanced Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show

This workshop is a sequel to Creation of Your Own Digital Fashion Show. Advanced topics include: how to create a custom body; edit the patterns; create and apply darts, gathers, and pleats to the patterns; render and create high-resolution images; and import and export body and clothing data between Maya and the Digital Clothing Suite. Finished animations are shown in The Studio, where attendees vote on their favorite designs. The best designer receives a six-month free trial of the Digital Clothing Suite.

Kathi Martin
Drexel University

Hyeong-Seok Ko
Seoul National University

Lighting Tokyo for Pixar's "Cars 2"

An in-depth look at the techniques used to light and render Tokyo in "Cars 2".

Mitchell Kopelman
Pixar Animation Studios

A Comprehensive Theory of Volumetric Radiance Estimation Using Photon Points and Beams

A novel, comprehensive theory of volumetric radiance estimation that leads to new insights and includes all previous radiance estimates as special cases. The authors use this theory to develop a more efficient rendering method for participating media based on "photon beams".

Wojciech Jarosz
Disney Research Zürich

Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Disney Research Zürich and University of Toronto

Iman Sadeghi
University of California, San Diego

Henrik Wann Jensen
University of California, San Diego

DINUS: Double Insertion, Non-Uniform, Stationary Subdivision Surfaces

The double insertion, non-uniform, stationary subdivision surface (DINUS) generalizes both the non-uniform, bicubic spline surface and the Catmull-Clark subdivision surface. DINUS allows arbitrary knot intervals on the edges, allows incorporation of special features, and provides limit point as well as limit normal rules.

Kerstin Müller
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

Christoph Fuenfzig
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

Lars Reusche
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

Dianne Hansford
Arizona State University

Gerald Farin
Arizona State University

Hans Hagen
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

"Megamind" - Lighting Metro City at Night

Lighting Metro City at night required solving the lighting challenge known as the "many lights" problem. This sketch describes how the lighting department solved this challenge.

Jimmy Maidens
DreamWorks Animation

Philippe Denis
DreamWorks Animation

Gianni Aliotti
DreamWorks Animation

Progressive Photon Mapping: A Probabilistic Approach

A novel formulation of progressive photon mapping based on a probabilistic derivation. Unlike the original progressive photon-mapping algorithm, this method does not require maintenance of local photon statistics. It extends progressive photon mapping to arbitrary kernels and includes stochastic ray tracing and volumetric photon mapping.

Claude Knaus
Universität Bern

Matthias Zwicker
Universität Bern

An Efficient Scheme for Curve and Surface Construction Based on a Set of Interpolatory Basis Functions

By interpolating basis functions built on the Sinc function with a Guassian multiplier, this technique constructs freeform interpolatory curves and surfaces through scattered data points.

Renjiang Zhang
Zhejiang Gongshang University

Weiyin Ma
City University of Hong Kong

Deferred Shading Technique Using Frostbite in Need for Speed The Run

A technical and production-oriented talk describing the tile-based lighting architecture and deferred rendering optimizations developed to achieve a visual target with hundreds of real-time lights per scene for Need for Speed: The Run at 30 frames per second on PlayStation3.

Alex Ferrier
Electronic Arts

Christina Coffin
DICE (Electronic Arts)

Cache-Oblivious Ray Reordering

A novel heuristic ray-reordering method for incoherent secondary rays. Its benefits are demonstrated in two stochastic rendering methods and different cache levels.

Bochang Moon
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Yongyoung Byun
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Tae-Joon Kim
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Pio Claudio
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Hye-sun Kim
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute

Yun-ji Ban
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute

Seung Woo Nam
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute

Sung-eui Yoon
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

DigiPen Institute of Technology

The Academic Infrastructure of Innovative and Successful Video Games
A detailed look at the academic infrastructure of interactive media technologies and the special emphasis placed on incorporating innovative game design and gameplay mechanics to make video games highly successful and marketable.

What’s New in Rhinoceros 5.0?

An overview of the new functionality and improvements in the Rhinoceros 5.0 update.

Jerry Hambly

Motion Graphics

This session is for attendees interested in motion graphics. Come and see cool projects, and exchange techniques and ideas!

Gil Irizarry
gil (at) conoa.com

In-Formation San Francisco ACM SIGGRAPH

This session is for attendees from San Francisco who are interested in the re-opening of the San Francisco ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter.

Tereza Flaxman
tflaxman (at) flaxanimation.com

Web3D Consortium Town Hall Meeting

This year has been particularly exciting, since a host of new technologies and initiatives are coming out of the Web3D Consortium. This session reviews the latest developments. Meet consortium members and learn more about our technology.

Anita Havele
anita.havele (at) web3d.org

The Bakery

Bakery Relight: Interactive Lighting, Shading, and Rendering for Pros
Designed for the high-end feature film, television, industrial, automotive, and architectural design industries, Bakery Relight is the first interactive, all-in-one lighting, shading, and rendering solution. Born out of years of hands-on experience on top-grossing feature films, Relight supports the lighters’ and shaders’ iterative process with full-resolution feedback in seconds.

Let There Be Hair

The trademark look of Rapunzel in Disney's "Tangled" presented unique challenges in grooming, rendering, and pipeline management. This talk discusses the original hair road map, changes required during production, and how the XGen system was used for grooming, rendering, and managing the hair data.

Thomas V. Thompson II
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Sean Jenkins
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Chuck Tappan
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Quill: Birds of a Feather Tool

"Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole" features over 60 distinctive, art-directed, hyper-realistic feathered characters. Animal Logic developed a procedural feathering pipeline, Quill, that allows a procedural representation of feathers with automatic de-intersection, animation, character effects, and dynamics, and rendered with extensive level-of-detail support.

Daniel Heckenberg
Animal Logic

Damien Gray
Animal Logic

Bryan Smith
Animal Logic

Jonathan Wills
Animal Logic

Chris Bone
Animal Logic

Digital Painting With ArtRage

ArtRage (owned by Ambient Design) is an easy-to-use, stylish painting package for Windows, Mac OS X, and iPad. This session explains the basics of ArtRage's painting functionality for texturing and art.

Uwe Maurer

Space-Time Planning With Parameterized Locomotion Controllers

A technique for animating characters traversing complex dynamic environments. The method uses motion capture to construct a set of controllers to traverse low-dimensional obstacles, and then employs a space-time planner to plan out the sequence in which the controllers must be used to traverse a complex dynamic environment.

Sergey Levine
Stanford University

Yongjoon Lee
University of Washington

Vladlen Koltun
Stanford University

Zoran Popović
University of Washington

Expression Flow for 3D-Aware Face Component Transfer

This paper addresses the problem of transferring facial components between images with different expressions. Expression Flow is a 2D flow field that warps the target face globally so that the warped face becomes compatible with the new feature to be blended in.

Fei Yang
Rutgers University

Jue Wang
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Eli Shechtman
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Lubomir Bourdev
University of California, Berkeley

Dimitri Metaxas
Rutgers University

Dynamic, Penetration-Free Feathers in "Rango"

A simulation-based technique to prevent animated feather penetrations that preserves the artist's visual development as closely as possible while providing a collision-free state for subsequent animation and simulation.

Stephen Bowline
Industrial Light & Magic

Zoran Kacic-Alesic
Industrial Light & Magic

Articulated Swimming Creatures

A general approach to creating realistic swimming behavior for a given articulated creature body, which includes creature/fluid simulation and swimming gait optimization. For a wide variety of aquatic creatures with different body shapes, the resulting motion matches that of real-world animals.

Jie Tan
Georgia Institute of Technology

Yuting Gu
Georgia Institute of Technology

Greg Turk
Georgia Institute of Technology

Karen Liu
Georgia Institute of Technology

Image-Guided Weathering: A New Approach Applied to Flow Phenomena

With this new technique, weathering data can be extracted from photographs of real scenes and applied to generate similar weathering appearance in new environments. Stains produced by fluid flow illustrate a representative case.

Carles Bosch
REVES/INRIA Sophia Antipolis

Pierre-Yves Laffont
REVES/INRIA Sophia Antipolis

Holly Rushmeier
Yale University

Julie Dorsey
Yale University

George Drettakis
REVES/INRIA Sophia Antipolis

Accurate Contact Resolution for Interpolated Hairs

An accurate, robust, and efficient method to handle penetration between interpolated hairs and subdivision surfaces during render time. The method works by converting the subdivision surfaces to Bezier patches and performing accurate hair-patch intersections using Newton's method. The method works on every frame independently.

Rony Goldenthal
Industrial Light & Magic

Locomotion Skills for Simulated Quadrupeds

This paper presents a large number of integrated locomotion skills for real-time physics-based quadrupeds. These skills include walk, trot, pace, canter, gallop, sit, lie-down, get-up, and parameterized leaps over barriers, across gaps, and onto platforms. The simulated motions are compared to known data for a dog.

Stelian Coros
University of British Columbia

Andrej Karpathy
University of British Columbia

Ben Jones
University of British Columbia

Lionel Reveret
INRIA

Michiel van de Panne
University of British Columbia

Exploring Photobios

A method for generating face animations from large image collections of the same person, by computing an optimized, aligned subsequence. This approach is the basis for the Picasa's Face Movies feature. A key contribution of this paper is proving why the cross dissolve produces a strong motion effect.

Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
University of Washington

Eli Shechtman
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Rahul Garg
University of Washington

Steven M. Seitz
University of Washington

Discrete Element Textures

A data-driven method for synthesizing phenomena characterized by repetitive discrete elements, such as a stack of fresh produce, a plate of noodles, or a mosaic pattern. The method is general and easy to use, requiring only a small input exemplar and a coarse output domain.

Chongyang Ma
Tsinghua University and Microsoft Research Asia

Li-Yi Wei
Microsoft Research

Xin Tong
Microsoft Research Asia

Composite Control of Physically Simulated Characters

This approach to constructing composite controllers that track multiple trajectories in parallel generates both high-quality animations and natural responses to certain disturbances.

Uldarico Muico
University of Washington

Jovan Popović
Abobe Systems Incorporated

Zoran Popović
University of Washington

Character Animation in Two-Player Adversarial Games

This paper describes how game theory can be used to automatically create intelligent real-time controllers for characters engaged in a competitive game. These controllers employ long-term planning, display an intelligent use of randomness, and exhibit nuanced strategies based on unpredictability, such as feints and misdirection moves.

Kevin Wample
University of Washington

Erik Andersen
University of Washington

Evan Herbst
University of Washington

Yongjoon Lee
University of Washington

Zoran Popović
University of Washington

Tracing Home participating artists casually explain and discuss their works, process, and ideas . These talks are followed by short Q & A sessions and an opportunity to meet and chat with the artists. All talks are presented in the Art Gallery.

Tokyo Race Lighting For "Cars 2"

Tokyo at night is one of the world's most beautiful locations. The architecture combined with a massive quantity of illuminated signs creates a visual complexity rarely seen elsewhere. The challenge was to recreate the emotional impact and excitement of downtown Tokyo but maintain the visual style of "Cars 2".

Mitchell Kopelman
Pixar Animation Studios

OpenSG

This session is for attendees interested in the OpenSG Open Source scenegraph system for interactive 3D and virtual reality applications.

Animated Lines

Animated Lines is an illusion of animated sequence that explores the processes and methods of illustrative and abstract forms of traditional hand-drawn animation techniques in a 3D digital process using Maya.

Sujan Shrestha
Towson University

Dynamic Simulation in Production

This session is for attendees interested in hearing about and discussing the latest trends in dynamic simulation (rigid, cloth, hair, fluids, etc.) in production. Come. Connect. Collaborate. Experience. Enjoy. Eat.

Mark A. McLaughlin
mark.mclaughlin (at) disney.com

ACM SIGGRAPH Pioneer Reception

Open to all Pioneers.

SIGGIG: Gays In Graphics

SIGGIG: Gays In Graphics is a social event for attendees involved in, interested in, or supportive of the GLBT community.

What Industry Needs Graduates and New Hires to Know

Zbrush Life Sculpting and Portraiture

How to use Zbrush for life drawing and portraiture, and how to apply skills and concepts from traditional sculpting and life drawing in a digital medium.

Demian Moon Stevens

Contributing Vertices-Based Minkowski Sum of a Nonconvex--Convex Pair of Polyhedra

An exact and efficient contributing-vertices-based algorithm for the Minkowski sum computation of a non-convex-convex pair of polyhedra. The algorithm handles non-manifold situations and extracts polyhedral holes of the sum. Several results

Hichem Barki
Université de Lyon

Florence Denis
Université de Lyon

Florent Dupont
Université de Lyon

Stereoscopy From XY to Z

Stereoscopy has been very well known since the 19th century. The theory is very simple: just present a left view of a scene to the left eye, and a right view to the right eye, and the viewer's brain perceives the depth of the scene. In 2011, stereoscopy is everywhere: in the latest blockbuster movies, in theaters, at home on 3D displays, in games on all platforms, and even on the go with the new wave of capable portable devices. Though the concept is simple, realizing a comfortable and convincing stereoscopic experience for the user implies many aesthetic and technical considerations that revolutionize our way of creating graphics content.

This comprehensive course summarizes standard stereo-projection techniques, audience depth perception and comfort factors, recommended uses of depth as a storytelling tool, how stereo is used in gaming and real-time applications, details on conversion of 2D content to 3D, guidance on new creative choices, and using depth in an aesthetic way.

COURSE SCHEDULE

9 am
Introduction and Welcome
Gateau

9:05 am
Stereoscopy Fundamentals and Depth Perception
Gateau

9:40 am
Stereopsis and 3D Hints
Salvati

10:10 am
Depth as a Storytelling Tool
Neuman

10:30 am
Real-Time and Gaming Techniques
Gateau

11 am
Cartoon Authoring for 3D
Salvati

11:30 am
Creative Choices for 3D
Neuman

11:50 am
Managing a Depth Budget
Neuman

12:10 pm
Conclusion: Questions

The Power of Atomic Assets: An Automated Approach to Pipeline on "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole"

The vast, fantastical world of Ga'Hoole, which ranged from deep pine forests to rocky canyons and deserts, was populated by a multitude of creatures brought together to play out a unique adventure. This talk focuses on the pipeline concepts and production methodologies that underpin the film's visual richness.

This in-depth discussion focuses on the production of Industrial Light & Magic’s first animated feature “Rango”. ILM’s unique approach to the genre brings a new dimension to the animated feature, giving “Rango” the visceral quality that the company is best known for in its visual effects work. The presenters review all aspects of the work from initial asset development through animation, simulation, lighting, and compositing.

Developing a Fab Lab for 3D Data Capture, Modeling, and Prototyping

Carlo Sammarco
Arizona State University
Dan Collins
Arizona State University

Don Vance
Arizona State University

Color Compatibility From Large Datasets

This paper studies color compatibility using large online datasets, and develops new tools for choosing colors to test new and existing theories of human color preferences and learn quantitative models that score the aesthetic quality of a color combination, and demonstrate the models in color selection tasks.

Peter O'Donovan
University of Toronto

Aaron Hertzmann
University of Toronto

Aseem Agarwala
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Cinematography: The Visuals & the Story

The virtual or actual camera, its placement in a scene, the choice of lens, the camera's movement, the lighting, color, and exposure all contribute to visual communication between the storytelling cinematographer and the audience. How each of these visual variables is controlled and used to help tell a story gives dramatic structure to a sequence and ultimately communicates moods and emotions to the viewer is critical to making any story come alive. A story has structure. The visuals must have structure, too.

Evaluating Enjoyment Within Alternate-Reality Games

This paper on understanding enjoyment within alternate-reality games discusses the unique demands of the genre and why pre-existing enjoyment models are not applicable.

Andrew Macvean
Heriot-Watt University

Mark Riedl
Georgia Institute of Technology

ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Business Meeting

The annual business meeting for the ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters.

Scott Lang
scott (at) siggraph.org

MeshFlow: Interactive Visualization of Mesh Construction Sequences

MeshFlow is an interactive system for visualizing polygonal mesh construction sequences. It hierarchically clusters editing operations visualized with graphical annotations to provide levels of detail on demand. MeshFlow was tested on five mesh sequences and evaluated with a case study using modeling students.

Jonathan Denning
Dartmouth College

William Kerr
Dartmouth College

Fabio Pellacini
Dartmouth College and Sapienza - Università di Roma

Animation Workflow in Killzone 3: A Fast Facial Retargeting System for Game Characters

Applying facial motion capture data on a virtual actor is always a tedious task. This talk explains a technique that helped Guerrilla Games deliver more than 30 different faces over 70 minutes of cut scenes for the AAA PlayStation 3-exclusive title Killzone 3.

Andrea Arghinenti
Guerrilla Games

Edge-Aware Color Appearance

The effect of edge smoothness on color has not been studied in color-appearance modeling. This paper examines the appearance of color under different degrees of edge smoothness, confirms that color appearance changes with increased smoothness, and demonstrates an appropriate appearance model.

There is a growing need for procedures that can support analysis and understanding of players’ behaviors within game environments. This paper proposes a system that allows analysts to build and compare visualizations of clusters of players to better understand the causes and effects of players’ actions.

Dinara Moura
Simon Fraser University

Magy Seif el-Nasr
Simon Fraser University

Christopher D. Shaw
Simon Fraser University

Adaptive Importance Sampling for Multi-Ray Gathering

This technique reduces ray-gathering noise with low overhead and no bias by incrementally modifying the directional distribution of future rays to be traced based on those already traced.

Ivan Neulander
Rhythm & Hues Studios

LR: Compact Connectivity Representation for Triangle Meshes

LR is a compact data structure for representing the connectivity of manifold triangle meshes. It supports constant-time incidence and adjacency queries while storing only one integer reference per triangle. Its greedy, linear-time construction involves ordering the vertices along a nearly Hamiltonian cycle.

Topraj Gurung
Georgia Institute of Technology

Mark Luffel
Georgia Institute of Technology

Peter Lindstrom
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Jarek Rossignac
Georgia Institute of Technology

Example-Based Image Color and Tone Style Enhancement

An example-based method for image color and tone-style enhancement that has been successfully applied in two scenarios: cell phone photo enhancement by transferring the style of a high-end camera and photo enhancement using styles learned from photographers.

Baoyuan Wang
Zhejiang University

Yizhou Yu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ying-Qing Xu
Microsoft Research Asia

Evaluating Gesture-Based Games With Older Adults on a Large-Screen Display

This work reports on design and evaluation of three novel gesture-based games with healthy older adults. It describes key features in the physical and social engagement, and general usability of the games, to determine their applicability to the target audience.

Mark Rice
Institute for Infocomm Research

Marcus Wan
Institute for Infocomm Research

Min-Hui Foo
Institute for Infocomm Research

Jamie Ng
Institute for Infocomm Research

Zyndie Wai
Institute for Infocomm Research

Janell Kwok
Institute for Infocomm Research

Samuel Lee
Institute for Infocomm Research

Linda Teo
Institute for Infocomm Research

On the Velocity of an Implicit Surface

Previously, only the normal component of the surface was known. This method of deriving a formula for the velocity of a time-evolving implicit surface applies the normal component to the problem of tracking particles on the surface and the problem of motion-blurring implicit surfaces.

Jos Stam
Autodesk, Inc.

Ryan Schmidt
Autodesk, Inc.

High-Resolution Relightable Buildings From Photographs

A low-cost image-based system that facilitates recovery of gross scale geometry, local surface detail, and approximated albedo to create highly detailed 3D models of building façades from photographs. The system requires simple data capture and modest user intervention.

Francho Melendez
The University of Manchester

Mashhuda Glencross
Loughborough University

Gregory. J. Ward
Dolby Canada

Roger J. Hubbold
The University of Manchester

Switchable Primaries Using Shiftable Layers of Color Filter Arrays

This paper presents a camera with switchable primaries (RGB, CMY and RGBCMY) using shiftable layers of color filter arrays. The system provides a new degree of photographic freedom in which multiple operational modes are available for optimizing the picture quality based on the nature of the scene, color, and illumination.

Behzad Sajadi
University of California, Irvine

Aditi Majumder
University of California, Irvine

Kazuhiro Hiwada
MIT Media Lab

Atsuto Maki
Toshiba Research Europe, Ltd.

Ramesh Raskar
MIT Media Lab

The Impact of Negative Game Reviews and User Comments on Player Experience

This study of how game reviews and user comments influence player experience found that players who read negative reviews rated the game lower than those who read either positive reviews or no reviews at all.

Ian Livingston
University of Saskatchewan

Lennart Nacke
University of Saskatchewan

Regan Mandryk
University of Saskatchewan

The Explorable Microscopy Project: Enabling New Science and Exploration Through Gigapixel Imaging at the Microscopic Level

What if you could explore the intricate detail of small subjects (such as a butterfly or embryo) much like an explorable map? Learn how new tools developed through the Explorable Microscopy collaborative project can help you do just that. This talk shows how these new tools can be used in your own work and examples of how the technology is enabling new science and research across a wide range of disciplines. In particular, it presents a range of low-cost motion-control devices, camera and lens options, open-source software, and online viewing applications that you can use in your work.

Gene Cooper
Four Chambers Studio, LLC

Rich Gibson

Randy Sargent
Carnegie Mellon University

Exhibition

OPTIS

Physics-Based Virtual Reality
Thanks to their unique physics-based approach, OPTIS light-simulation specialists provide real-time, predictive visualization solutions based on measured physical properties of surfaces and materials. OPTIS solutions are used by engineers, ergonomists, and designers to optimize perceived quality and the visual ergonomics of HMIs.

WebGL

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard based on OpenGL ES 2.0. It is shader-based, using GLSL, and it brings plugin-free 3D to the web, directly into the browser.

Khronos Group
marketing (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Practical integration of Alembic

A dialogue with the Alembic development team focused on pipeline integration and optimization of the format. Topics include API usage, collaboration with studio partners, and standardization of the format.

Erik Strauss
estrauss (at) imageworks.com

OpenSceneGraph BOF

This discussion of the OpenSceneGraph open-source system includes new developments, how to use the software, and how people are using it.

John Richardson
richards (at) spawar.navy.mil

Motion Capture Society

This session is open to everyone who has an interest in motion capture. Topics and presentations include various hardware and software solutions, pipelines, and techniques for getting the best data.

Troy McFarland
troy.mcfarland (at) gmail.com

Leonardo Community Meeting

Leonardo community members and all SIGGRAPH attendees are invited to hear presentations from selected Leonardo Affiliate Member organizations on cutting-edge research and educational programs in ArtScience around the world.

Pamela Grant-Ryan
pgr (at) leonardo.info

Animation by Young Asian Artists

The Digital Content Association of Japan (DCAJ) shows some of the animation works by young Asian artists who won prizes at the Digital Creators Competition 2010.

Eddie Suzuki
suzuki (at) dcaj.or.jp

DIYLILCNC

The DIYLILCNC is an inexpensive, 3-axis, tabletop mill that can be built by an individual with basic shop skills and tool access. The open-source plans are free to download from diylilcnc.org, where makers can collaborate with a global community of DIY CAD/CAM enthusiasts.

Taylor Hokanson
Oakland University

World Creation in CryENGINE

Have you ever wanted to make a videogame? This session shows how to build a small level in the freely available CryENGINE 3 SDK. Topics include: world building and tools (FlowGraph, CryENGINE's visual scripting language, and Trackview, the camera sequencing and directing tools). In less than an hour, attendees create their own playable video games.

Chris Evans
CryENGINE

All in a Day's Work: A Study of World of Warcraft NPCs Comparing Gender to Professions

This study explores whether non-player characters within World of Warcraft reinforce stereotypical assumptions surrounding gender and work. Even though all professions are represented (albeit not equally) by male and female NPCs, there seem to be subtle hierarchies within the distribution of "work" in this gameworld.

Kelly Bergstrom
York University

Victoria McArthur
York University

Jennifer Jenson
York University

Tamara Peyton
York University

Production Volume Rendering 1

Computer-generated volumetric elements such as clouds, fire, and whitewater are becoming commonplace in movie production. The goal of this course is to familiarize attendees with the technology behind these effects. The presenters have experience with and have authored proprietary volumetrics tools.

The course begins with an introduction to generating and rendering volumes, then presents a production-usable volumetrics toolkit, focusing on the feature set and why those features are desirable. Special emphasis is focused on the approaches taken in tackling efficient data structures, shading approaches, multi-threading/parallelization, holdouts, and motion blurring.

COURSE SCHEDULE

10:45 am
Introduction to Production Volume Rendering
Bin Zafar

11 am
Volume Modeling Fundamentals Wrenninge

11:40 am
Volume Rendering Fundamentals
Bin Zafar

12:10 pm
Questions and Answers

Industrial Application of CG in Japan

The Digital Content Association of Japan (DCAJ) presents some of the most recent examples of industrial application of CG technology in Japan.

Eddie Suzuki
suzuki (at) dcaj.or.jp

Antialiasing Recovery

This method for restoring antialiased edges that are damaged by certain types of nonlinear image processing operations selectively adjusts the local gradients in affected regions of the filtered image so that they are consistent with those in the original image.

Lei Yang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Pedro Sander
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Jason Lawrence
University of Virginia

Hugues Hoppe
Microsoft Research

We Built This City: Big City Design and Implementation in "Kung Fu Panda 2"

This presentation describes construction of a large city environment for DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2", including how the chosen technique was driven at every step by the film's design language and story needs to deliver an epic setting within reasonable time constraints.

Wes Burian
DreamWorks Animation

Data-Driven Elastic Models for Cloth: Modeling and Measurement

This data-driven technique to construct elastic models for cloth creates a database of 10 different cloth materials, each of which exhibits distinctive elastic behaviors. These measurements can be used in simulation systems to create natural and realistic clothing wrinkles and shapes.

Huamin Wang
University of California, Berkeley

James O'Brien
University of California, Berkeley

Ravi Ramamoorthi
University of California, Berkeley

Dynamic 3D & Photoshop Integration

How to creatively integrate 3D models into Photoshop CS5 Extended to create concept art. This session focuses on how to import, texture, and build a mate painting with third-party 3D models in CS5.

Stephen Burns
The San Diego Photoshop Users Group

Designing Stories: Narrative Practices in 3D Computer Games

Drawing on theories from game, film, and theater studies, this paper explores two primary ways in which 3D computer games deal with stories.

Teun Dubbelman
Universiteit Utrecht

Local Laplacian Filters: Edge-Aware Image Processing With a Laplacian Pyramid

This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art edge-aware image processing using Laplacian pyramids. The advantage of this approach is its conceptual simplicity and flexibility, based on simple point-wise nonlinearities; no optimization or post-processing is required. The method produces consistently high-quality results, without degrading edges or introducing halos.

Sylvain Paris
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Sam Hasinoff
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and MIT CSAIL

Jan Kautz
University College London

The Visual Style of "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole"

“Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga'Hoole” evokes an epic nocturnal owl world, eschewing a cartoon aesthetic in favour of a dark, operatic style. The emotional drama of the story was more important than maintaining a sense of realism or naturalism.

Grant Freckelton
Animal Logic

Craig Welsh
Animal Logic

Ben Gunsberger
Animal Logic

Frame-Based Elastic Models

A new type of deformable model that combines the realism of physically based models and the usability of frame-based skinning methods. The degrees of freedom are coordinate frames. Viscoelastic forces are computed based on continuous media mechanics applied to the smoothly deformed volume.

Benjamin Gilles
The University of British Columbia, INRIA

Guillaume Bousquet
Université de Grenoble, LJK, INRIA

François Faure
Université de Grenoble, LJK, INRIA

Dinesh Pai
The University of British Columbia

Beyond Player Types: Gaming Achievement Goals

Educational psychology studies use motivational constructs called achievement goals to predict learning success. This paper examines whether gaming achievement goals influence game play in similar ways. Gaming achievement goals could help determine whether people will play and which players are more likely to learn from educational games.

Carrie Heeter
Michigan State University

Yu-Hao Lee
Michigan State University

Ben Medler
Georgia Institute of Technology

Brian Magerko
Georgia Institute of Technology

Domain Transform for Edge-Aware Image and Video Processing

A new approach for performing high-quality edge-preserving filtering of images and videos in real time.

Eduardo S.L. Gastal
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Manuel M. Oliveira
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Clouds in the Skies of Rio

Blue Sky Studios produced a large number of art-directed cloud environments for "Rio", using optimized creation, management, compositing, and ray-tracing technologies and techniques.

Andrew Schneider
Blue Sky Studios

Trevor Thomson
Blue Sky Studios

Mathew Wilson
Blue Sky Studios

Example-Based Elastic Materials

This example-based approach for simulating complex elastic material behavior constructs an example manifold that acts as an additional elastic attractor and guides the object toward preferred shapes. It allows implementation of inhomogeneous and anisotropic materials in a direct and intuitive way.

Sebastian Martin
ETH Zürich

Bernhard Thomaszewski
Disney Research Zürich and ETH Zürich

Eitan Grinspun
Columbia University

Markus Gross
Disney Research Zürich and ETH Zürich

Modeling Play: Re-Casting Expertise in MMOGs

Studies of expertise in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) involve either small-scale ethnographic accounts of elite players or large-scale accounts relying on one-dimensional measures of expert play. This paper presents a quantifiable model of expertise in MMOGs that is generated through qualitative analyses of both novices and experts.

A new efficient method for joint recovery of both reliable local dense correspondences and a global parametric color transformation model between two images. The paper demonstrates several applications of this method for automatic example-based enhancement of photographs that share some content.

Yoav Hacohen
The Hebrew University

Eli Shechtman
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Dan Goldman
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Dani Lischinski
The Hebrew University

Sparse Meshless Models of Complex Deformable Solids

A new method to physically simulate the deformation of objects with heterogeneous material properties and complex geometries using a small number of moving frames.

ZBrush New Features - From Concept to Final Render

Thomas Roussel from Pixologic presents the latest features of ZBrush and explains how to go from concept to final render.

Thomas Roussel
Pixologic Inc.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

OpenCL and OpenGL/DirectX Interoperability
The computing power of GPUs is now accessible to improve the interactivity of 3D graphics. Leveraging this capability requires optimum interoperability between compute (OpenCL) and graphics APIs (OpenGL/DirectX). This talk demonstrates how to compute and update geometry with OpenCL on APUs, how to update VBO on discrete GPUs, and how to compute physics data on OpenCL and transfer those data to discrete GPUs.

CG in Europe

An overview of the state of CG in European countries, including Eurographics 2012, scheduled for May in Italy. Speakers include:

Michael Bielicky
HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe, Data Driven Narratives

Jorge Jimenez and Diego Gutierrez
University of Zaragoza, New Advances in Real-Time Graphics for Video Games

Mashhuda Glencross and Francho Melendez
University of Loughborough, 3D Recontruction From Images

Francho Melendez
franchomelendez (at) gmail.com

rest3d BOF

This session is for attendees interested in creating a RESTful web service for 3D content. More information: rest3d.org

Remi Arnaud
remi (at) acm.org

Rhinoceros 5.0: Rendering and Texture-Mapping Improvements

This system captures and stitches gigapixel-scale time-lapse imagery and explores the resulting gigapixel-scale video in four dimensions: 2D translation, zoom, and time. Workshop topics include: how to author content, how to explore, and how to define “warps” through gigapixel video and render them into standard, linear video.

Randy Sargent
Chris Bartley
Paul Dille
Carnegie Mellon University

Professional and Student ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Start-Up Meeting

The Professional and Student Chapters of ACM SIGGRAPH span the globe. Within their local areas, chapters continue the work of ACM SIGGRAPH on a year-round basis via their meetings and other activities. Each chapter consists of individuals involved in education, research and development, the arts, industry, and entertainment who are interested in the advancement of computer graphics and interactive techniques, related technologies, and their applications. Chapter members gather throughout the year at meetings, site visits, conferences, video screenings, art shows, and special events.

This session explains how to start and run a successful ACM SIGGRAPH Professional or Student Chapter. Topics regarding the process are outlined in detail by members of the Chapters Committee, and the session concludes with a Q&A session.

Scott Lang
scott (at) siggraph.org

Real-World Camera-Rig Creation

How to build, evaluate, and rig to create truly believable camera animation without tracking data. Imagine having a steady camera movement in 3D, or a 3D crane whose rig moves like a crane does in film. This session explains rigging and automation for real-world camera control in 3D.

Zeb Wood

Autodesk, Inc.

Multi-Threaded 2D Renderer Design
Rendering real-time high-quality 2D vector graphics through a 3D pipeline is a challenging task that requires custom algorithms for shape tessellation, edge anti-aliasing, and text rendering. For best performance, Scaleform 2D renderer includes optimizations such as multi-threaded rendering, mesh caching, and draw-primitive batching. Following a high-level design description, this talk dives into multi-threaded rendering, introducing a novel render-tree design that allows the both threads to access scene graph nodes simultaneously, greatly reducing copy overhead. This strategy is particularly effective when only a subset of nodes is modified every frame and can be applied to any real-time rendering engine.

Daily Art Tours

Members of the Art Galley committee offer 30-minute guided tours to introduce visitors to Tracing Home and some of the specific artworks displayed in the exhibition. The daily tours begin in the Art Gallery.

Map Design + Social and Environmental Issues: Graphic Design Education at Its Best

How to foster engagement in social and environmental issues through a graphic design assignment focused on creation of visually interesting folded, printed maps and instruction on aspects of sustainable print production and design techniques and processes.

Jessica Ring

The New Media and the Industry in China

Representatives from Chinese industry and universities discuss how their digital media programs are developing to meet the needs of their exploding economy.

SIGGRAPH Education Committee, Marc J. Barr
mjbarr (at) mtsu.edu

The New Media and the Industry in China

Representatives from Chinese industry and universities discuss how their digital media programs are developing to meet the needs of their exploding economy.Panel Discussion
Patrick Pennefather
Centre For Digital Media, Vancouver

OpenCL

Meet designers and implementers of this significant new standard for heterogeneous parallel programming on GPUs and CPUs. Learn how OpenCL inter-operates with OpenGL to enable advanced, cross-platform, visual-computing applications.

Khronos Group
marketing (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Games at SIGGRAPH Meetup

The goal of this session is to encourage dialog about new technologies in game development and interactive graphics. Discussion topics include mobile and social games, research in games and interactive graphics, and effective collaboration.

David Milam
dma35 (at) sfu.ca

"T-Splines 3 for Rhino: What's New"

Matt Sederberg
T-Splines Inc.

Production Volume Rendering 2

Computer-generated volumetric elements such as clouds, fire, and whitewater are becoming commonplace visual effects. This course provides a behind-the-scenes look at the techniques used and how they are implemented. It demonstrates tools and workflows that are not typically covered in production talks but are integral to successful completion of many effects.

The presenters, who have innovated the use of volumetric methods in industry and created some of the most impressive on-screen effects, summarize how specific artistic needs lead to innovations and review the success and evolution of their methods. They also discuss the software-engineering issues they have encountered and their solutions.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction
Bin Zafar

2:05 pm
Rhythm & Hues
Tessendorf & Grant

2:35 pm
Clinton

3:05 pm
Weta Digital
Bouthors

3:35 pm
Break

3:55 pm
Double Negative
Harding & Graham

4:25 pm
Sony Pictures Imageworks
Wrenninge

Bounded Biharmonic Weights for Real-Time Deformation

Deformation by linear blending dominates practical use as the fastest approach for transforming 2D and 3D shapes. This paper develops "bounded biharmonic weights" that produce smooth and intuitive deformations for any combination of points, bones, and cages of arbitrary topology, making control of deformations simple and flexible.

Alec Jacobson
New York University

Ilya Baran
Disney Research Zürich

Jovan Popović
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Olga Sorkine
New York University

Imageworks: The Smurf-alution: A Half-Century of Character Development

Sony Pictures Imageworks animation supervisor Troy Saliba and leading members of their Vancouver animation team take the Smurfs from the most primitive pencil sketch to a contemporary 3D stereo rendering.

GPU Ray Tracing

Join the third annual GPU Ray Tracing Birds of a Feather session. Show off your demos. Share your use cases, ideas, and gripes. High-performance CPU ray tracing is welcome, too.

Character Rigging, Deformations, and Simulations in Film and Game Production

This course focuses on rigging, deformations, dynamics, and production practices in animation, visual effects and game development. Topics include analysis of performance requirements, motion system set-up, procedural rigging for secondary animation, and efficient extension of techniques over a wide range of primary and secondary characters.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Welcome and Introductions of Speakers
McLaughlin

2:05 pm
Structure of the Course and Overview of Our Approach to Rigging [What the Course is and What it is Not]
McLaughlin

2:15 pm
Rigging for Visual Effects
McLaughlin

3:05 pm
Immediate Questions
McLaughlin

3:10 pm
Rigging for Games
Coleman

4 pm
Immediate Questions
Coleman

4:05 pm
Rigging for Feature Animation
Cutler

4:55 pm
Immediate Questions
Cutler

5 pm
General Questions and Answers
McLaughlin, Coleman, and Cutler

Applying Color Theory to Digital Media and Visualization

This course highlights the visual impact of specific color combinations, provides practical suggestions on color mixing, and includes a hands-on session that teaches how to build and evaluate color schemes for digital media visualization.

An Introduction Into After Effects for Motion Graphics

An overview of the basic function of timeline-based animation using Adobe After Effects for motion graphics. Topics include: interface, workflow, using the timeline, layers, integration with Photoshop basic type, and object animation.

Mike Ring
The Garden

Anatomy of a Dragon: 2D to 3D

This student-focused, interactive presentation delivers insights from a traditional and 3D animation artist to guide attendees on a path of discovery, knowledge, and sometimes frustration to a sense of completion when drawing and animating a dragon.

Graham Toms
NewTek, Inc.

Blended Intrinsic Maps

This method for inter-surface mapping generates a map between two surfaces by blending multiple low-dimensional (conformal) maps with smoothly varying weights. Performance is evaluated on a diverse dataset and compared our resulting maps to several state-of-the-art methods.

Vladimir Kim
Princeton University

Yaron Lipman
Princeton University

Thomas Funkhouser
Princeton University

High-Quality Passive Facial Performance Capture Using Anchor Frames

A new technique for high-quality facial performance capture that leverages the repetitive structure of face motions to automatically locate frames with similar expressions, called anchor frames. High-resolution geometry is reconstructed and temporal motion is propagated in parallel using robust image-space matching between the anchor frames.

Thabo Beeler
ETH Zürich and Disney Research Zürich

Fabian Hahn
Disney Research Zürich

Derek Bradley
Disney Research Zürich

Bernd Bickel
Disney Research Zürich

Paul Beardsley
Disney Research Zürich

Craig Gotsman
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Robert W. Sumner
Disney Research Zürich

Markus Gross
Disney Research Zürich

Kali: High-Quality FEM Destruction in Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch"

The Moving Picture Company introduces Kali, a finite-element-based simulation toolkit for large-scale and detailed destruction, developed in collaboration with Pixelux. The toolkit is described with examples from Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch".

Ben Cole
The Moving Picture Company

Biharmonic Distance

A new distance measure on manifolds based on the biharmonic differential operator that provides a nice trade-off between nearly geodesic distances for small distances and global shape-awareness for large distances.

Yaron Lipman
Princeton University

Raif Rustamov
Drew University

Thomas Funkhouser
Princeton University

Interactive Region-Based Linear 3D Face Models

A linear face modelling approach that generalizes better to unseen data and allows click-and-drag interaction for animation. The model consists of a collection of linear submodels independently trained but related through shared boundaries. It is demonstrated on dense-face motion capture data.

J. Rafael Tena
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Fernando De la Torre
Carnegie Mellon University

Iain Matthews
Disney Research Pittsburgh

Directing Hair Motion on "Tangled"

This hybrid approach to combining the power of custom hair dynamics with the artistic control of key-framed animation was key to the success of directing hair motion on "Tangled".

Maryann Simmons
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Kelly Ward
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Hidetaka Yosumi
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Hubert Leo
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Xinmin Zhao
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Photo-Inspired Model-Driven 3D Object Modeling

An algorithm for photo-inspired creative 3D modeling where the user draws inspiration from a single photograph and the modeling process is supported by an available set of candidate objects.

Kai Xu
National University of Defense Technology and Simon Fraser University

Hanlin Zheng
Zhejiang University

Richard (Hao) Zhang
Simon Fraser University

Daniel Cohen-Or
Tel Aviv University

Ligang Liu
Zhejiang University

Yueshan Xiong
National University of Defense Technology

Real-Time Performance-Based Facial Animation

This paper presents a system for performance-based character animation that enables any user to control the facial expressions of a digital avatar in real-time using a non-intrusive, commercially available 3D sensor.

Thibaut Weise
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Sofien Bouaziz
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Hao Li
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Mark Pauly
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Choreographing Destruction: Art Directing a Dam Break in "Tangled"

Creation of a highly art directed "dam breaking with resulting flood" sequence for Disney's "Tangled" by applying the 12 basic principles of animation to a fluid-based simulation through post manipulation of timing and shape.

Michael Kaschalk
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Brett Boggs
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Andrew Selle
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Lawrence Chai
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Xsens Technologies B.V.

How Much Animation Can You Do in a Day?
This talk shows how to speed up your pipeline with the Xsens MVN animation tool. It also explains how to record a motion, edit the motion, and insert it into a scene in no time, or even real time, using the Xsens MVN system.

Using Processing and G-Speak as Tools Within a Foundations Program at a School of Art and Design

Teaching design with Processing, drawing with G-Speak: how the Rhode Island School of Design's Division of Foundation Studies is expanding the envelope of introductory digital concepts for students of art and design.

Mark Milloff and Clement Valla
mmilloff (at) risd.edu

Rhinoceros 5.0: A Look at the UDT Commands

Explore Rhino commands that use its uniform deformation technology to morph and bend 3D geometry.

Jerry Hambly
McNeel Associates

Managing Creative Projects

This session is for attendees interested in discussing creative projects and how to manage them, with a particular emphasis on Agile methodologies.

Gil Irizarry
gil (at) conoa.com

Join the International Resources Committee in 2012!

Informal overview of the ACM SIGGRAPH International Resources Committee, its year-round activities, and the International Center at the annual SIGGRAPH conference.

Are you a world citizen interested in international culture and the state of computer graphics across the globe? The committee is looking for volunteers to represent these world regions: USA + Canada, Mexico, South + Central America, Southern Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe + Russia, Africa + Middle East, Korea, Southeast Asia + China + India, Japan, Australia + New Zealand.

X3D and HTML5/X3DOM

Learn more about X3DOM, fully integrated X3D with HTML with no plug-ins. currently supported in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers.

Johannes Behr
Johannes.Behr (at) igd.fraunhofer.de

Converting 3D Furniture Models to Fabricatable Parts and Connectors

A grammar-based framework for converting 3D furniture models to separate parts and connectors that can be physically built, which allows nonprofessional users to create products that they can use themselves by "printing" 3D furniture models.

Manfred Lau
Japan Science and Technology Agency

Akira Ohgawara
The University of Tokyo and Japan Science and Technology Agency

Jun Mitani
University of Tsukuba and Japan Science and Technology Agency

Takeo Igarashi
The University of Tokyo and Japan Science and Technology Agency

Sensor Calibration

Each camera model has different exposure responses as it performs accurate long exposures or combines exposures for HDR. For optimum results, it is imperative to know your specific camera's sensor response. This presentation explains sensor response, sensor noise, and how to establish the appropriate sensor response for your camera. Topics include:

Organic Motion

Real-Time Eulerian Water Simulation Using a Restricted Tall Cell Grid

A new real-time Eulerian fluid simulation that uses a hybrid grid of regular cubic cells on top of a layer of tall cells above an arbitrary terrain. The method includes a novel multigrid method and several fluid solver modifications, and achieves 30fps in real-world scenarios on a modern GPU.

Nuttapong Chentanez
NVIDIA PhysX Research

Matthias Müller-Fischer
NVIDIA PhysX Research

Crowds on "Cars 2"

A discussion of how the "Cars 2" character and crowd departments co-developed a strategy to maximize show asset efficiency and agent behavioral flexibility into a production pipeline doubling the shot throughput.

Material connections are everywhere: from architectural environments to machines and electronics. These connections manifest as seams, joints, and corners, usually with visually apparent orthogonal lines. Graded material transition is an alternative material-connection method that challenges the dominance of pronounced orthogonal seams in today’s built environment.

Hironori Yoshida
Carnegie Mellon University

Make it Home: Automatic Optimization of Furniture Arrangement

This paper introduces a framework for automatic generation of furniture arrangement, considering human factors such as accessibility, visibility, pathways, etc. The framework generates arrangements for a variety of scenarios.

Lap-Fai Yu
University of California, Los Angeles

Sai-Kit Yeung
University of California, Los Angeles

Chi-Keung Tang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Demetri Terzopoulos
University of California, Los Angeles

Tony F. Chan
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Stanley Osher
University of California, Los Angeles

Display Pixel Caching

Display pixel caching fills empty borders that occur when videos are displayed on a screen with mismatching aspect ratios and/or resolutions with spatially and temporally consistent information while preserving the original video format. It merges the motion information from subsequent frames to generate high-resolution panoramas in a consistent manner.

Clemens Birklbauer
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

Oliver Bimber
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

Tianlun Liu
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

Max Grosse
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Anselm Grundhöfer
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Two-Scale Particle Simulation

A two-scale method for particle-based fluids that allocates computing resources to regions of the fluid where complex flow behavior emerges. This method produces similar surface details as the single-resolution simulation while improving the efficiency.

Barbara Solenthaler
ETH Zürich

Markus Gross
ETH Zürich

Synthesizing Complexity for Characters and Landscapes in "Rio"

A new modular architecture for the film "Rio" enabled artists to procedurally generate and animate vast quantities and varieties of detail, from flocks of birds in windswept jungles to thousands of costumed characters at Carnaval, while improvements to voxel rendering and sparse octree geometry caches facilitated ray-tracing this complexity.

Sean Palmer
Blue Sky Studios

Eric Maurer
Blue Sky Studios

Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines

An interactive furniture layout system that assists users by suggesting furniture arrangements based on interior design guidelines. Results demonstrate that the suggestion-generation functionality measurably increases the quality of furniture arrangements produced by participants with no prior training in interior design.

Paul Merrell
Stanford University

Eric Schkufza
Stanford University

Zeyang Li
Stanford University

Maneesh Agrawala
University of California, Berkeley

Vladlen Koltun
Stanford University

Device-Independent Imaging System for High-Fidelity Colors

A device-independent imaging system for accurately capturing and faithfully reproducing colors.

Akiko Yoshida
SHARP Corporation

Kazunari Tomizawa
SHARP Corporation

Makoto Hasegawa
SHARP Corporation

Yasuhiro Yoshida
SHARP Corporation

Yoshifumi Shimodaira
Shizuoka University

A PML-Based Nonreflective Boundary for Free Surface Fluid Animation

This paper presents a method for achieving non-reflecting boundaries when animating free surface fluids. The boundaries are based on the perfectly matched layer (PML) approach and are intended to allow localized high-quality simulations of large fluid domains such as oceans.

Andreas Söderström
Linköpings universitet

Matts Karlsson
Linköpings universitet

Ken Museth
DreamWorks Animation

Staging Carnival: Ray Tracing Crowds in "Rio"

Blue Sky Studios developed an efficient workflow for staging the carnival scenes in the "Rio" and created a way of rendering them in a ray tracer such that a scenes with more than 30,000 characters fit in the memory of a single computer.

Hugo Ayala
Blue Sky Studios

Matthew Simmons
Blue Sky Studios

Christopher Moore
Blue Sky Studios

Interactive Architectural Modeling With Procedural Extrusions

Procedural extrusion is a new, easy-to-use tool that combines arbitrary plans and profiles to create a wide range of architectural forms. This paper demonstrates the technique's application to procedural modeling of cityscapes.

Tom Kelly
University of Glasgow

Peter Wonka
Arizona State University

Who Do You Think You Really Are?

Presented by David Attenborough, "Who do you think you really are?" is an interactive film that uses cutting-edge technology, including location-based augmented reality and real-time audience participation, to take audiences on an immersive, interactive journey into their evolutionary past.

Ailsa Barry
The Natural History Museum

Mark Jacobs
BBC

Guide Shapes for High-Resolution Naturalistic Liquid Simulation

To efficiently obtain natural-looking liquid simulations subject to art direction, this method processes approved low-resolution geometry into a "guide shape" just below the liquid surface. The final high-resolution simulation runs just a surface layer constrained by the guide, with benefits for both speed and control.

Michael Nielsen
Weta Digital Ltd

Robert Bridson
University of British Columbia and Weta Digital Ltd

Metropolis Procedural Modeling

This paper brings artistic control to grammar-based procedural models via Markov-chain Monte Carlo inference. Given a grammar and a high-level specification, the algorithm computes a production from the grammar that conforms to the specification. The method is demonstrated on models of trees, cities, buildings, and Mondrian paintings.

Jerry Talton
Stanford University

Yu Lou
Stanford University

Steve Lesser
Stanford University

Jared Duke
Stanford University

Radomir Mech
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Vladlen Koltun
Stanford University

Animating Fire With Sound

A technique for synthesizing synchronized sounds for physically based fire animations. A hybrid method simulates low-frequency flame sounds using a physics-based approach, and then uses bandwidth extension and sound-texture synthesis to synthesize fiery high-frequency details.

Jeffrey Chadwick
Cornell University

Doug James
Cornell University

Tracing Home participating artists casually explain and discuss their works, process, and ideas . These talks are followed by short Q & A sessions and an opportunity to meet and chat with the artists. All talks are presented in the Art Gallery.

OpenGL

Learn more about OpenGL, the most widely adopted 2D/3D graphics API, from the ARB and leading OpenGL companies.

Khronos Group
marketing (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Educators Meet and Greet

An informal reception at the SIGGRAPH Village for all educators attending SIGGRAPH 2011.

Marc J. Barr (SIGGRAPH Education Committee)
mjbarr (at) mtsu.edu

The Visual Style of “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”

“Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga'Hoole‚” evokes an epic nocturnal owl world, eschewing a cartoon aesthetic in favor of a dark, operatic style. The visuals were created on the assumption that the emotional drama of the story was more important than maintaining a sense of realism or naturalism.

Ringling College Alumni Reception

A gathering for alumni and friends of the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Lucy Foss
lfoss (at) ringling.edu

Web3D Consortium

X3D: 3D Anywhere!

From mobile devices to enterprise workstations to immersive CAVEs, X3D is the only open-standard (ISO), royalty-free file format and run-time specification for interactive virtual environments. With multiple encodings and API bindings, it is compatible with numerous web and industry technologies and remains the most robust and versatile open standard for implementing high-integrity and high-capability 4D multimedia information spaces. New features and data integration (such as HTML5 and volume rendering) are rapidly expanding X3D 3.3's value in applications ranging from mobile to AR, CAD, and medical. This talk presents the innovative community of content and application developers that ensures the interoperability, longevity, and ownership of your content. See the latest real-world interactive 3D applications and find out how you can build and protect your content investment in this ever-changing competitive market.

Purdue University Alumni Reception

Blacks in Animation & VFX

Join us for our third annual networking event with students, artists, recruiters, educators, and executives of color in the animation, VFX, and gaming industries.

Krystal Cooper
blackanimation (at) gmail.com

Image and Video Upscaling From Local Self-Examples

A new, high-quality, and efficient single-image upscaling method that exploits local self-similarities in the data and reduces search time. The method is implemented using novel non-dyadic filter banks that allow real-time processing when converting low-resolution video formats into HD standards.

Gilad Feedman
Hebrew University

Raanan Fattal
Hebrew University

Vignette Correction in GigaPan Stitch

GigaPan Stitch stitches together hundreds or thousands of overlapping images to create a very-high-resolution mosaic image. Without correction, such mosaics can be marred by vignetting (darkening of photographs in the lens periphery). Fortunately, it is possible to infer the vignetting attenuation function from the image overlaps and apply correction during blending. This workshop presents an algorithm for vignette correction that is fast, robust, and automatic.

Paul S. Heckbert
GigaPan

Randy Sargent
Carnegie Mellon University

The New Media and the Academy in China

Representatives from Chinese academic digital media programs discuss how their programs are developing to meet the needs of their exploding economy.Panel Discussion
Patrick Pennefather
Centre For Digital Media, Vancouver

Yang Xiaosong
National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University

Larry Bafia
Centre For Digital Media, Vancouver

Closing Remarks
Marc J. Barr
Chair, ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee

The New Media and the Academy in China

Representatives from Chinese academic digital media programs discuss how their programs are developing to meet the needs of their exploding economy.

SIGGRAPH Education Committee, Marc J. Barr
mjbarr (at) mtsu.edu

Photochromic Sculpture: Volumetric Color-Forming Pixels

Photochromic sculpture, which consists of a presentation part composed of laminated transparent plates coated with photochromic material granules and a control part for projecting UV light patterns that color volumetric pixels, can generate a dynamically changeable three-dimensional sculpture.

Tomoko Hashida
The University of Tokyo

Yasuaki Kakehi
Keio University

Takeshi Naemura
The University of Tokyo

Occlusion Culling in Alan Wake

This talk discusses implementation of the occlusion culling system used in Alan Wake and presents details on how the system efficiently supports shadow-caster culling for dynamic light sources in large environments.

Compiler Techniques for Rendering

This course summarizes five cutting-edge projects that apply compiler technology to improve the performance and functionality of renderers and shading systems. Several of the projects use LLVM, so the course begins with a gentle introduction to LLVM architecture and concepts. Topics include: customizing shading languages for global illumination and other advanced rendering, analysis of shaders so that renderers may perform physically based light transport in correct units, automatic differentiation, and use of LLVM and dynamic code generation for improved shader performance.

Scalable and Coherent Video Resizing With Per-Frame Optimization

A scalable and temporal coherent video retargeting method that factors the problem into spatial and motion components. The sub-problem sizes are proportional to a frame resolution, and they can be solved in parallel. The system dramatically reduces computational time and memory consumption without compromising quality.

Yu-Shuen Wang
National Chiao Tung University

Jen-Hung Hsiao
National Cheng Kung University

Olga Sorkine
New York University and ETH Zürich

Tong-Yee Lee
National Cheng Kung University

Increasing Scene Complexity: Distributed Vectorized View Culling

A new solution and approach to culling complex game scenes on parallel architectures at high performance.

Andrew Routledge
Electronic Arts: Blackbox

Real-Time Large-Deformation Substructuring

A technique for making model reduction of FEM deformable objects undergoing large deformations adaptable in space. The object is decomposed into several domains, which are reduced independently, and combined with elastic and inertial coupling. The method can simulate rich, detailed deformations of complex structures at hard real-time rates.

Jernej Barbič
University of Southern California

Yili Zhao
University of Southern California

Subspace Video Stabilization

A robust and efficient approach to video stabilization that achieves high-quality camera motion for a wide range of videos and is sufficiently practical for consumer applications.

Feng Liu
Portland State University

Michael Gleicher
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jue Wang
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Hailin Jin
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Aseem Agarwala
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Practical Occlusion Culling in Killzone 3

KIllzone 3 features complex occluded environments. To cull non-visible geometry early in the frame, the game uses PlayStation 3 SPUs to rasterize a conservative depth buffer and perform fast synchronous occlusion queries against it. This talk presents an overview of the approach and key lessons learned during its development.

Michal Valient
Guerrilla Games

Solid Simulation With Oriented Particles

Using particles with orientation enables simulation of rigid, plastic, and soft bodies as well as one-, two-, and three-dimensional structures with only a few simulation nodes. In addition, the system uses orientation information to robustly skin visual meshes and increase the accuracy of the particle-based collision volume.

Matthias Müller-Fischer
NVIDIA PhysX Research

Nuttapong Chentanez
NVIDIA PhysX Research

Tonal Stabilization of Video

This paper presents a method for reducing undesirable tonal fluctuations in video: minute changes in tonal characteristics, such as exposure, color temperature, brightness, and contrast in a sequence of frames. These distracting fluctuations are typically caused by the camera's automatic setting adjustment.

Zeev Farbman
The Hebrew University

Dani Lischinski
The Hebrew University

High-Quality Previewing of Shading and Lighting for Killzone 3

This novel content creation framework, consisting of Guerrilla's own game-rendering engine embedded inside Autodesk Maya, achieves high-fidelity previews of assets while preserving flexibility, so work can continue during the preview.

Francesco Giordana
Guerrilla Games

Physics-Inspired Upsampling for Cloth Simulation in Games

With this method for learning linear upsampling operators in physically based cloth simulation, coarse meshes are enriched with mid-scale details in minimal time and memory budgets, as required in computer games.

Ladislav Kavan
Disney Interactive Studios

Daniel Gerszewski
University of Utah

Adam Bargteil
University of Utah

Peter-Pike Sloan
Disney Interactive Studios

Rhinoceros 5.0 Workflow Improvements

See how Rhino 5 will improve your modeling techniques and process.

Pascal Golay
McNeel

Exhibition

Mobile APIs

Get the inside track on OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenMAX, and all the new-media APIs being used to develop the billion-dollar, billion-user gaming and mobile multimedia markets!

Khronos Group
marketing (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Virtual Construction Toys

Using 3D graphics for LEGO, Zoob, an Erector set, etc. in a touch-based environment. What would apps do to enable virtual play? What kinds of interaction make sense?

Julian Gomez
jeg (at) polished-pixels.com

Lighting Worlds in Unity

This in-depth session shows how artists can make the most of Unity's real-time lights, built-in Beast lightmapping, and light probes. Part two of the talk discusses custom lighting models using Unity's surface shaders and alternative applications of light probes. The session is designed for artists and programmers, and requires basic understanding of lighting concepts in games.

Robert Cupisz
Unity Technologies

KeyShot: Amazing Rendering and Animation in Real Time

KeyShot breaks down the complexity of creating photographic images from 3D models, so anybody involved with 3D data can create photographic images in a matter of seconds, independent of the size of the digital model. This exclusive, in-depth preview of the next version of KeyShot demonstrates how it can be applied to animation. With KeyShot 3, users can animate designs with a simple, interactive setup and easy manipulaion of components in a 3D, interactive, ray-traced environment. No complex key framing required. The finished 3D product can be played back in real time with ray-traced quality.

Brian Townsend
Luxion ApS

Computational Stereo Camera System With Programmable Control Loop

This computational stereo camera system closes the control loop to handle traditionally difficult shots. It is completely programmable, so complex shots can easily be scripted and adjusted depending on the scene and artistic preferences.

Simon Heinzle
Disney Research Zürich

Pierre Greisen
Disney Research Zürich and ETH Zürich

David Gallup
University of North Carolina

Christine Chen
ETH Zürich

Daniel Saner
ETH Zürich

Aljoscha Smolic
Disney Research Zürich

Andreas Peter Burg
ETH Zürich

Wojciech Matusik
Disney Research Zürich

Markus Gross
ETH Zürich and Disney Research Zürich

Gaussian Quadrature for Photon Beams in "Tangled"

A robust solution for integrating photon beams into PhotoRealistic RenderMan for the animated feature "Tangled".

A new data structure for efficient representation of sparse, time-varying volumetric data discretized on a 3D grid.

Ken Museth
DreamWorks Animation

Industrial Light & Magic: New Solutions for New Challenges

The Industrial Light & Magic team delves into the effects created for three of 2011’s largest summer films, dissecting the challenges and revealing their solutions. The panel breaks down the visual effects challenges presented on this year’s slate of films including: “Cowboys & Aliens”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”.

Making Burr Puzzles From 3D Models

A computational approach to creating burr puzzles from 3D models while enforcing a single-key property in the 3D puzzle-construction process. When the puzzle is assembled, all the pieces are notched except the key piece, which remains mobile.

Shiqing Xin
Nanyang Technological University

Chi-Fu Lai
Nanyang Technological University

Chi-Wing Fu
Nanyang Technological University

Tien-Tsin Wong
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ying He
Nanyang Technological University

Daniel Cohen-Or
Tel Aviv University

Designing Curriculum for 3D Computer Animation: Innovation and Experimentation for an Evolving Discipline

Visual effects and 3D animation are ever-evolving disciplines, and the fluidity and constant innovation that are at the core of these fields present very specific challenges to educators. In the past 20 years, the volume of computer-animation programs offered by educational institutions has expanded dramatically. Schools around the world are constantly experimenting with new curriculum ideas and educational strategies, trying to provide students with the best opportunities to develop their potential as computer artists and as future players in the computer animation industry.

What makes an undergraduate or graduate program in 3D computer animation successful? Why do some schools seem to be so much better than others? How are they different, in philosophy, educational strategies, proposed projects, curriculum grid, industry relationships, and resources?

This panel brings together leaders and thinkers from some of the top animation schools in the world to present, discuss, and share their specific approaches and educational philosophies. An outreach expert from DreamWorks Animation, and a talent-development director from Walt Disney Animation Studios present the industry point of view.

Moderator
Raquel Coelho
San José State University

Panelists
Eric Riewer
Gobelins, l’école de l’image

Maija Burnett
California Institute of the Arts

Thomas Haegele
Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg

Jim McCampbell
Ringling College of Art + Design

Tim McLaughlin
Texas A&M University

Marilyn Friedman
DreamWorks Animation

Dawn Rivera-Emster
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Importance Sampling of Area Lights in Participating Media

A method to effectively importance sample the single scattering integral in homogeneous participating media from point lights and area lights of arbitrary shapes.

Christopher Kulla
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Marcos Fajardo
Solid Angle SL

Highlighted Depth-of-Field Photography: Shining Light on Focus

A camera-projector system casts distinct grid patterns onto a scene to generate a spatial distribution of point reflections. These point reflections relay a relative measure of defocus that is utilized in post-processing to generate a highlighted depth-of-field photograph.

Capturing Thin Features in Smoke Simulations

A system for smoke simulation that allows thin features to be captured even in simulations with low fluid-field resolution.

Magnus Wrenninge
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Chris Allen
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Henrik Fält
Sony Pictures Imageworks

Stephen Marshall
Sony Pictures Imageworks

A Geometric Study of V-Style Pop-Ups: Theories and Algorithms

We study a simple but common class of pop-ups: the v-style pop-ups. Conditions are given for a v-style paper structure to be pop-uppable. Based on these conditions, we developed an interactive tool for designing v-style pop-ups and an automated construction algorithm.

Xianying Li
Tsinghua University

Tao Ju
Washington University in St. Louis

Yan Gu
Tsinghua University

Shimin Hu
Tsinghua University

Decoupled Ray Marching of Heterogeneous Participating Media

A method for efficient ray tracing of heterogeneous participating media using ray marching by decoupling the lighting calculations from the sampling of volume properties.

This method optimizes auto-multiscopic displays composed of compact volumes of light-attenuating material. Inexpensively fabricated by stacking transparencies, the attenuators recreate a light field when illuminated by a backlight. Tomographic optimization resolves inconsistencies between views, leading to brighter, higher-resolution 3D displays with extended depth of field and improved dynamic range.

Depixelizing Pixel Art

A novel algorithm for extracting a resolution-independent vector representation from small pixel art images, which enables magnifying the results by an arbitrary amount without image degradation. Pixel-scale features are resolved and converted into regions with smoothly varying shading that are crisply separated by piecewise-smooth contour curves.

Johannes Kopf
Microsoft Research Redmond

Dani Lischinski
The Hebrew University

Demand-Driven Volume Rendering of Terascale EM Data

A new demand-driven volume rendering approach for extremely large electron microscopy (EM) volume data that for the first time allows neurobiologists to view terabyte-sized EM volumes interactively, without pre-computing a 3D multi-resolution representation beforehand.

Johanna Beyer
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Markus Hadwiger
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Won-Ki Jeong
Harvard University

Hanspeter Pfister
Harvard University

A Perceptual Model for Disparity

This paper summarizes a psychophysical experiment to determine human sensitivity to binocular disparity on modern 3D stereo equipment. The obtained data were used to formulate a model of perceived disparity that lays the foundations for effective disparity compression, retargeting, personalized stereo, hybrid stereo images, and a perceived disparity-difference metric.

Correcting Low-Frequency Impulses in Distributed Simulations

Digital Micrography

An algorithm for creating micrography images, or micrograms, a special type of calligram that utilizes miniscule text. Traditional micrograms represent images using readable meaningful text and require both artistic skills and a lot of manual work. This computerized digital micrography design tool simplifies the process.

Ron Maharik
The University of British Columbia

Mikhail Bessmeltsev
The University of British Columbia

Alla Sheffer
The University of British Columbia and INRIA Rhône-Alpes

Ariel Shamir
Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya

Nathan Carr
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Keyshot

Tom Teger
Luxion

Augmented and Mixed Reality

Learn more on how to extend X3D capabilities to support augmented reality and mixed reality applications.

Johannes Behr
Johannes.Behr (at) igd.fraunhofer.de

Web3D Korea Chapter Meeting

Meet The Web3D Korea Chapter members and discuss their current initiatives on the X3D specification: augmented reality, E-learning, mobile function, and other X3D implementations.

Anita Havele
anita.havele (at) web3d.org

Run-Time Implementation of Modular Radiance Transfer

Modular Radiance Transfer is a recent technique that computes approximate direct-to-indirect transfer by warping and combining transport from a small library of simple shapes. This talk discusses implementation issues that arose when scaling the algorithm from mobile devices to high-end GPUs.

This simple framework for progressive processing of high-resolution images with minimal resources implements an adaptive, multi-resolution solver for gradient-based image processing that is capable of real-time seamless cloning for images that are hundreds of gigapixels in size.

Brian Summa
University of Utah

Giorgio Scorzelli
University of Utah

Ming Jiang
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Peer-Timo Bremer
University of Utah and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Valerio Pascucci
University of Utah

Guerrilla: The Creation of Killzone 3 - Game Production Session

This talk details various aspects of designing and developing videogames at Guerrilla. It highlights methods that are very similar to methods used in the CGI industry, and it illuminates some of the most important differences. And it covers the complete breadth of videogame development from artistic design to production pipelines and tool and engine development.

Filtering Approaches for Real-Time Anti-Aliasing

For more than a decade, supersample anti-aliasing (SSAA) and multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) have been the gold-standard anti-aliasing solutions in games. However, these techniques are not well suited for deferred shading or fixed environments like the current generation of consoles. In recent years, industry and academia have been exploring alternative approaches, where anti-aliasing is performed as a post-processing step. The original, CPU-based morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) method gave birth to an explosion of real-time anti-aliasing techniques that rival MSAA.

Most of these techniques share concepts and ideas, so the main goal of this course is to establish a conceptual link between them, identifying novelties and differences. The presenters explain how sub-pixel data can be used to improve quality and performance tradeoffs at post-processing steps, which is a cutting-edge research area today. The course includes an overview of both research and industry filter-based anti-aliasing techniques in games for all modern platforms (AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360), low-level insight to ease adoption of these techniques and give attendees a complete concept-to-implementation roadmap, and deep quality, performance, and ease-of-integration comparisons of each technique.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction
Gutierrez & Jimenez

2:05 pm
A Directionally Adaptive Edge Anti-Aliasing Filter
Yang

2:20 pm
Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA)
Reshetov

2:35 pm
Jimenez's MLAA
Jimenez

2:50 pm
Hybrid CPU/GPU MLAA on the Xbox-360
Demoreuille

3:05 pm
Low-Latency MLAA in God of War III
Perthuis

3:20 pm
PlayStation Edge MLAA
Berghoff

3:35 pm
The Saboteur Anti-Aliasing (SPUAA)
Yu

3:50 pm
Break

4 pm
Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA)
McGuire

4:15 pm
Fast approXimate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)
Lottes

4:30 pm
Distance-to-Edge Anti-Aliasing (DEAA)
Malan

4:45 pm
Geometry Buffer Antialiasing (GBAA)
Persson

4:55 pm
Directionally Localized Anti-Aliasing (DLAA)
Andreev

5:10 pm
Crysis 2 Anti-Aliasing
Sousa

5:25 pm
Wrap-up and Discussion: Questions and Answers

Circular Arc Structures

As a means of rationalization of freeform architectural designs, "circular arc structures" combine faithful consistency with the design intent and simple edge elements and congruent nodes. This paper summarizes the method's easily manufactured support elements, repetition, the first global approximation method for principal patches, and volumetric designs.

Pengbo Bo
University of Hong Kong and Technische Universität Wien

Helmut Pottmann
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and Technische Universität Wien

COLLADA

See cutting-edge DCC tools and applications for gaming, 3D web, and visualization, and artworks generated from COLLADA content-creation-supporting media.

Khronos Group
marketing (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Next-Generation Image-Based Lighting Using HDR Video

An overview of a systems pipeline for high-dynamic-range video capture, reconstruction, and modeling of real-world scenes with strong spatial variations in the lighting environment, which enables photo-realistic rendering of synthetic objects placed in the scene.

Jonas Unger
Linköpings universitet

Stefan Gustavson
Linköpings universitet

Joel Kronander
Linköpings universitet

Gerhard Bonnet
SPHERON-VR AG

Gunnar Kaiser
SPHERON-VR AG

Geodesic Image and Video Editing

A new, unified technique to perform general edge-sensitive editing operations on n-dimensional images and videos efficiently. Introduction of a generalized geodesic distance transform provides the unifying framework to efficiently address several editing operations such as de-noising, segmentation, and non-photorealistic rendering.

Antonio Criminisi
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Toby Sharp
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Carsten Rother
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Patrick Perez
Technicolor Paris Research Center

Andrew Fitzgibbon
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Building the Birds of "Rio"

An examination of the process and technology used to build control systems for birds in Blue Sky Studio's "Rio" using the main character Blu as a case study.

Triple Depth Culling

A simple and efficient method for pixel-scale occlusion culling in arbitrarily complex scenes.

Jean-Eudes Marvie
Technicolor Research & Innovation

Pascal Gautron
Technicolor Research & Innovation

Gaël Sourimant
Technicolor Research & Innovation

Matting and Compositing of Transparent and Refractive Objects

This image-based model for matting and compositing transparent and refractive objects from single images encodes plausible refractive properties of a transparent object and its observed specularities and transmissive properties. The method simulates compound compositing, Fresnel effect, scene depth, and caustic shadows from the extracted model.

Sai-Kit Yeung
University of California, Los Angeles and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Chi-Keung Tang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Michael Brown
National University of Singapore

Sing Bing Kang
Microsoft Research

"Kung Fu Panda 2": Rigging a Peacock Tail

Creation of the "Kung Fu Panda 2" peacock tail rig and an approach that streamlines the animation process while adhering to a broad and complex specification.

Robert Vogt
PDI/DreamWorks

HOT: Hodge-Optimized Triangulations

Introducing Hodge-optimized triangulations (HOT), a family of well-shaped primal-dual pairs of complexes designed for fast and accurate computations in computer graphics.

This solution to the ill-posed, non-uniform point-spread-function (PSF) estimation problem transforms it into a well-posed image-registration problem that estimates homographies representing the motions of camera shakes in 3D.

Sunghyun Cho
Pohang University of Science and Technology

Hojin Cho
Pohang University of Science and Technology

Yu-Wing Tai
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Seungyong Lee
Pohang University of Science and Technology

Nonlinear Revision Control for Images

A nonlinear revision-control system for images that supports review, diff, addition, branching, merging, and conflict resolving, and facilitates artistic creation in common image editing and digital sketching tasks. The core idea is a DAG structure that represents the spatial, temporal, and semantic relationships between operations.

Hsiang-Ting Chen
National Tsing Hua University

Li-Yi Wei
Microsoft Research

Chun-Fa Chang
National Taiwan Normal University

Optimized Local Blendshape Mapping for Facial-Motion Retargeting

This facial-motion retargeting method for blendshapes without any prior knowledge of facial segmentation delivers better visual quality than traditional local blendshape mapping methods.

Wan-Chun Ma
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Graham Fyffe
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Paul Debevec
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Spin Transformations of Discrete Surfaces

This paper introduces a new method for computing conformal maps directly between triangle meshes in R^3. Conformal maps are desirable because they preserve texture fidelity and the quality of the mesh itself. The method is simple and can be used to efficiently edit surfaces by manipulating curvature and boundary data.

Keenan Crane
California Institute of Technology

Ulrich Pinkall
Technische Universität Berlin

Peter Schröder
California Institute of Technology

Clipless Dual-Space Bounds for Faster Stochastic Rasterization

A novel method for increasing the efficiency of stochastic rasterization of motion and defocus blur. Contrary to earlier approaches, the method is efficient even with the low sampling densities commonly encountered in real-time rendering, while allowing the use of arbitrary sampling patterns for optimum image quality.

Samuli Laine
NVIDIA Research

Timo Aila
NVIDIA Research

Tero Karras
NVIDIA Research

Jaakko Lehtinen
NVIDIA Research

Simulating Massive Dust in "Megamind"

This talk summarizes the components of an extremely fast fluid-simulation framework for animated special effects, including the specific numerical methods used to achieve high performance and good visual quality, and the setup and control framework that allowed artists to work efficiently at high resolution.

Decoupled Sampling for Graphics Pipelines

A generalized approach to decoupling shading from both visibility and geometry sampling in graphics pipelines. The technique enables stochastic supersampling of motion and defocus blur and other effects at reduced shading cost, without requiring micropolygon rendering. It can be thought of as a generalization of GPU-style multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA).

Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
MIT CSAIL

Jaakko Lehtinen
MIT CSAIL

Jiawen Chen
MIT CSAIL

Michael Doggett
Lunds universitet

Frédo Durand
MIT CSAIL

“Megamind”: Fire, Smoke, and Data

Exploding a super hero in DreamWorks Animation's “Megamind” was a large-scale task. This talk presents solutions to some of the technical hurdles and the collaborative work flow to that facilitated them.

Krzysztof Rost
DreamWorks Animation

Greg Hart
DreamWorks Animation

Designing With Constraints: Parametric BIM

This talk discusses building information modeling (BIM) tools as an opportunity for design generation, validation, and implementation. It specifically focuses on parametric modeling and constraint-based design explorations and construction assemblies.

Andrzej Zarzycki
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Spark: Modular, Composable Shaders for Graphics Hardware

Spark improves on current real-time shading languages by supporting better software development practices. It allows the logical features of a real-time shader to be expressed as independent, composable modules, even where a feature cross-cuts multiple stages of the rendering pipeline.

Tim Foley
Intel Corporation and Stanford University

Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University

Volumetric Effects in a Snap

How and why Animal Logic created Snap,a grid-based simulation and volumetric rendering framework used in "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole" and "Sucker Punch".

Joseph Hegarty
Animal Logic

Denis Teplyashin
Animal Logic

Peter Georges
Animal Logic

Daniel Heckenberg
Animal Logic

Form-Making With Special Effect Tools

This talk focuses on strategies for generative-design validation with the use of digital simulations, particularly dynamics-based modeling tools. It focuses on tools that employ rigid-body or soft-body dynamics, such as cloth simulations, forward and inverse kinematics (FK/IK), and particle interactions.

Andrzej Zarzycki
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Physically Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering

An efficient method to render lens flare of complex optical systems. Based on a combination of traditional ray tracing and rasterization, our technique captures the intricate dynamics of real flare phenomena, while spanning a continuum between accuracy and performance, physical realism and artistic expression.